It's not just US-centric. DDG is just a little bad about local queries in general. With Google, if I'm looking for a local business, or something in the news locally, there's a decent chance I can just search for it and I'll find what I'm looking for. With DDG I need to explicitly tell it the locale I'm interested in.
On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.
On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.