You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols
Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.
I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her.
That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search.
The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize.
Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.
Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news.
I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows.
Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.
If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed.
What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.
I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience
The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared.
I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist
You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.
I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)
news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.
When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share"
Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always
Also, blocking a source hides it from "Headlines"/"Sections"/"Topic" pages, but not from keyword search results pages. You'll still get your blocked sources displayed in those. (Confusingly, when you search for "brexit", you can get back two different "Brexit" topic pages, which have the same title but different pictures, or you can get a keyword search results page, which behaves differently.)
For example if I write `range`, it's extremely vague but one of the first results I get is Python. If I write range JavaScript obviously that'll be first.
I have found personalisation doesn't work for any search product. YouTube's ranking engine won't get me what I'm looking for. Google's personalised search doesn't get me what I'm looking for, and the de-personalised whilst better, only gets me halfway there because it still tries to geo-bubble me.
I am aware that what I search for makes me slightly outside the norm. All attempts to bubble me fail because of that, and turn your product into nothing more than an exercise in frustration as I try to escape the narrow roads you expect me to walk.
It also helps me search for content vs for listings, sometimes I want information on a product and not the local merchant, with Google the closest I would get was switching to news search (also not optimal).
But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.
On YouTube, I highly recommend turning off personalization and watch history, especially if you find yourself spending too much time there clicking recommended videos. Without history, it will pretty reliably recommend the same videos again and again, which can help you realize when you have seen a lot and might want to stop.
It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features.
Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.
Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms.
I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned.
The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content).
It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.
Somehow the Instagram ads algorithm has figured out exactly what I’m self conscious about with my own body; all I see are ads for invisible braces, skin cleansers, and hair treatments.
I don’t actually want to buy any of these things, and they make me feel bad to look at. A de-personalized Instagram experience would be far superior to me.
An unpersonalized IG ad experience would be teenage women's clothing and Netflix branding (assuming you're in the US). You probably don't want that either.
And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.
A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.
Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.
If your non-personalised experience is stunted in functionality because the core UX of the product is biased towards personalisation, it will be unsurprising if people "prefer" personalisation.
As somebody who uses search products many times a day and who has opted in to the less personalized experience in several different ways over the past several years, I can confidently assure you that I very strongly prefer the "less personalized" experience. Additionally, I don't feel like I need a shower just because I used it.
Why on earth would I want you to track me more? I don't see any reason.
Far longer than a month. It’s a vastly superior experience.
99% of personalization is utter shit. Having hard filters ("never these domains" on search engines, "don’t try and get me to rewatch things" or "No comedy" on Netflix) would top shitty personalization (aka. hey, I’m dumb, but please watch this) every time.
edit: For me. I realize that the majority of people seem to want tech to guess/tell them what they actually wanted.
I absolutely prefer non-personalized web search results, the YouTube home page you get when you are not signed-in (and have cookies deleted) and suggestions based on the current view only (not on the previous history). I confidently assure you ;-)
Obviously there are people who feel different.
So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.
What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.
It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".
For US, DDG still is fine I guess for basic results like local websites. If you are traveling to other countries, notice that DDG will often give very bad results for queries with local relevance.
I ran away from data collection and personalisation at the start of the last decade, but I often these days leave it on, because it just makes my life easier. Another example would be Google Photos, where letting Google run my photos through algos is very convenient because the simple feature of searching by visual context works like magic. The young privacy freak me would have been horrified if he knew this.
I don't use Google for search, though, so I can't comment on that.
I don't want it to display what some service _thinks_ I want, I want it to display what I'm asking for. No more, no less.
Clicking that link, turns out I’ve had all of those personalisation features switched off for nearly a year.
Don’t be so confident that your ranking/personalisation products are universally appreciated