I'm starting to see Google search results based on my social circle | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to see Google search results based on my social circle

google.com

32 pointsAndrewWarner14 comments

I do NOT want my social circle to have influence in my search decisions. It's only going to encourage more of the groupthink/clanning crap we already have so bad on the net.

I'm mixed on this. But it does explain a weird "Google for X, it's on the first page," "No, it's not!" incident at work that resulted in a 5 minute team Googlefest.

It could also be due to http://www.google.com/history/optout?hl=en

I disabled this. It's appaling that it's on by default.

Whoa... Any idea how to turn this off? My friends have terrible taste.

Its kind of buggy right now. It's showing that I have lots of contacts, but my social search results seem to be based on a social circle of one: me.

Speaking about taste.... they are your friends :)

I know you're joking but it's worth saying: pick your friends because they are decent and kind people, not because they have the sane interests as you.

I was joking, but we are speaking about taste, not interest. Since you usually make friends in the social circles you inhabit, it would be likely that your friends share similar if not the same interests.

On the flip side, not every one who is kind and decent will be a good friend to you.

Eh, I thought it was funny :D

Most of my friends are not in the software industry; they're busy Googling how to operate their AOL subscription, not the nitty gritty of JVM internals.

This is terrible advice. Kind and decent people are usually boring to talk to, and it's especially bad if you have no interests in common with them.

I'm finding Google more and more intrusive. On their help page they say to log out of your account if you don't want this, but then I lose my gmail connection. I've tried switching to bing for searches, but it's not as good. So I am thinking of moving from gmail - does anyone have any good recommendations as a replacement?

[edit: anyone use runbox?]

Note that this feature is (for now, at least) designed to add weight to content _created_ by your social circle. It does not, as I first thought, modify your search results based on friends' preferences.

From Google's FAQ: "Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better."

More info here: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

This is something I've wondered about for a long time and glad to see it being implemented. The current iteration seems to have lots of random people listed as first order connections though.

Interesting. This is almost like becoming a collective brain when searching for stuff.

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