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Comment by qjz | Hacker News Reader

So, your argument is that it's bullshit because it's true?

I see it as being a straw man argument.

The article makes the assumption that personalized search results are bad for you, then goes on exemplifying it, but does not say or demonstrate in any way why personalized search results are bad, especially since it doesn't give any context about the person making those queries.

Search ranking is a matter of context. "Egypt" does not mean anything, other than the name of a country, and different people mean different things. When you're searching for "Egypt" and want to get travel tips, if you don't get them you can always expand your query to "Egypt travelling tips". But even that is a pretty shallow request and you can further expand it like "Egypt travel guide to the pyramids".

The search engine's job is to find what I'm looking for. And IMHO the current state of the art is a little behind my expectations - I would have expected these personalized results to be far more effective than they are by now.

It's true that sometimes I'm looking for specific things, but other times I'm searching to get an idea of "what's out there", to fill gaps in my knowledge and make sure I'm appraised of what's going on in the world. It'd be nice to at least have some control over what kinds of searches I'm doing. For example, if I search for my own name, what I want to know is something like: what are the most common search results other people get when they search for my name. The same is usually true if I'm doing "related work" type searching for research; I explicitly want to find stuff outside my immediate area of specialization, in order to make sure I'm not missing anything that other people would've expected me to cover.

I understand that, but if the search results are not personalized for you, then they must be personalized for the common denominator, as in the hive, the majority's opinion, the status quo.

For general search queries, the long tail goes out the window anyway, and I haven't done or seen any quality metrics for DDG, but I doubt their search results are better for exploration or getting opinions different from your own.

I agree. I think people will surround themselves with a filter bubble with or without personalized search results. Ever tried to convince an avid Fox or CNN reader to read the opposing view's site?

From my personal experience, people rarely search for something as simple as "Egypt," and instead, search for "Egypt travelling tips" like your example.

If your Google-fu is strong, you'll write a query that targets your desired results much better than a generic shot-in-the-dark query.

It's bullshit because search is filtering and the filtering done by search is being exaggerated by those who peddle this bullshit.

I expect my search to be faithful to the terms I enter. If the results aren't satisfactory, I'll narrow the search with additional terms. Withholding information based on some guess at my political leanings is dishonest. I'd be appalled if a librarian did it; why should I expect less from a search engine?

If you went to a librarian and said "show me Egypt", she would have nowhere to start. A conversation would then ensue about what you are interested in.

Keep going to the library, keep having those conversations, and eventually, the librarian will take you straight to the books you want when you ask for Norway. If you want something different, you'll have to explicitly ask.

What Google is doing is no different. It just happens to have a lot more conversations with you.

What Google is doing is no different only if you can, in your ensuing "conversations," correct a misinterpretation that may have happened somewhere along the way. If your ability to do that is hampered because the only way to do it is by clicking on something, you don't see the thing to click on which will do this, then the filtering is not helping (and actually works against Google's and my mutual interests).

In theory, there are two types of corrections, one is blatant, the other is subtle:

- You blatantly correct the conversation by adding additional text to the search: "norway government" versus "norway travel".

- You subtly correct the conversation over time with more government queries/clicks/likes or more travel queries/clicks/likes.

Listening to Matt Cutt's response, it sounds like all of these signals are pretty minor anyway.

Not sure where you are going with your dichotomy- if you are unable to correct in either case (because you don't get the option of clicking on a correct answer) then it fails. I suppose with enough perseverance you could trick the search engine into showing you what you want- if you know it exists in the first place- but then, (1) just enter the very specific term to start with, and (2) this defeats the attempts to become more relevant.

I agree with you that these seem to be small changes. So far.

That's a good point, but I think it kind of misses the forest for the trees. It's true that personalization might sometimes lead Google to mistakenly show you less relevant results, but it seems pretty certain that the opposite would also be true — a generic page will sometimes show less relevant results than a personalized one. One search result is going to be shown ahead of another either way. If showing a less relevant result ahead of a more relevant one is considered "hampering," I don't see any reason this "hampering" is unique to personalized search.

I think it would come down to a matter of degree. A slight change in the order of results is pretty meaningless either way. But major alterations, where some pages are relatively inaccessible, could obviously be an impediment to getting the results we want.

Let me try this example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But one day you are writing a blog in which you want to search for background, but you need to use a non-scientific meaning of the same word. Perhaps a psychic used the term and you are debunking. The particular case is irrelevant. The point is tha if personalization is too aggressive you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.

This isn't privacy FUD or anything, just a pragmatic warning. The FUD comes when you start thinking about how their algorithms might actually decide which results you are "interested" in. Thinking of Google, what bu siness are they in? What about you behavior on the web most interests them? Would they decide that the most interesting things to you are the ones on which you clicked the most ads?

But whatever change personalized search makes relative to generic search, the opposite change will occur going from personalized to generic. To penalize personalized search when the change is of equal magnitude going either direction doesn't seem fair. As long as the personalizations are just a transformation and not a subtraction, the two options are just mirror images of each other. They have the exact same kind of failure condition. The question is just which one's failure conditions are more likely to occur.

As a counter-example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But most people aren't looking for scientific info, so you constantly have to dig and dig to find anything relevant on Google. The point is, if the search technology is too impersonal, you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.

As long as the personalizations are just a transformation and not a subtraction

This is the crucial point. As long as it's accessible, I can get what I want by search refinement either way (but I would imagine that it would be easier for me to refine in the space in which I am familiar than to refine in the unfamiliar space). Giving me the (easy) option to turn it off is a good idea for search.

What does faithful mean? You want German or Chinese results? You want global or local results (in your language of choice). There is always personalization in search.

The 'political leaning results' are just a tool the author used to try to explained his (ill-informed) point, there are no evidence to any such degree of personalization specially not to any 'bubble' inducing extent, it's all very sensationalistic.

And for the record the political example was about facebook wall.

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