This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's not something that bothers me terribly by itself, it may not be important yet, I just don't like the precedent and idea of it.
And Facebook just can't seem to remember that I never am interested in whatever it considers "top stories", but always, every time I log on, switch it to "most recent". Not that I know that I actually get all the most recent stuff, but on top of that Facebook is clearly telling me it would prefer me to see its own curation of it, even though I obviously have no interest in that. That this option doesn't stick seems like the intended behaviour, and I consider that yet another hostile aspect of it. So I'll assume whatever they're now doing instead of a UI that deserves the title, it will understand text just fine when it suits advertisers, and will be useless otherwise. Not a claim, but a guess.
I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
Except you're diminishing the importance of search results ordering. Some research has shown that ~50% of clicks go to the top two search results and ~90% of clicks go to the top ten search results.
And Facebook just can't seem to remember that I never am interested in whatever it considers "top stories", but always, every time I log on, switch it to "most recent". Not that I know that I actually get all the most recent stuff, but on top of that Facebook is clearly telling me it would prefer me to see its own curation of it, even though I obviously have no interest in that. That this option doesn't stick seems like the intended behaviour, and I consider that yet another hostile aspect of it. So I'll assume whatever they're now doing instead of a UI that deserves the title, it will understand text just fine when it suits advertisers, and will be useless otherwise. Not a claim, but a guess.