Google: Search, plus Your World | Hacker News Reader

Google: Search, plus Your World

googleblog.blogspot.com

148 pointsUncle_Sam81 comments

To me, the biggest part of this announcement is this:

We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.

Google's slowly been making their results more personalized, without having an easy way to opt-out (if you use a Google account). Now that there's this prominent option, I'm less bothered by them adding more personalization by default.

How far does this 'de-personalization' go? Do they still factor in user agent, screen size, geography etc.? I would guess that even an anonymized Google search is still fairly 'personal'.

If you just log out of your google account search should be fully 'de-personalized' right?

That would be up to Google. They still know your IP address, general location, browser, OS, etc. and can use that to "personalize" your search results.

That can still be 5 different people in one house. Or several hundred in a neighborhood.

Cookies can solve that. If that's how it works is another question.

And use pws=0.

Or use NoCrap Google Search Bar (and Firefox) to add pws=0 automatically: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/120144

[disclaimer: I'm NoCrap author]

They still cookie you

You can always compare with http://scroogle.org/. Though I sometimes wonder if its results have been "personalized" for a collective mind.

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

> Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web.

No, they are not. What's meaningful to me are the experiences of people (anyone) who have been to where I'm thinking of going, and their average rating.

Imagine this on Amazon: when considering buying a book, would you want to see the reviews of "your friends", of which maybe one or two have read the book you're looking at and taken the time to comment on it, or would you rather have access to the collective knowledge of millions of Amazon customers...?

It depends; my friends may not have so many reviews, but on the other hand, I know they aren't shills or idiots. Preferably, I want both, which is what Google seems to offer from now on.

I disagree. Because the things I value are different from the things everyone else values in a vacation. Same reason I can look at the bestseller list in Amazon and be completely uninterested in most of the titles.

That's not to say that I have the same taste as all my friends, either. But it's true that their experiences are often much more meaningful, if only because I know them well and understand how they would come to the conclusions they came to regarding a specific review, and I can extract a lot of information from that.

More than that, though, I want Google to be able to learn from my preferences and my friends' preferences in order to point me to the most relevant content.

The collective knowledge of the internet as an aggregate, averaged out, is not useful to me. It doesn't become useful until it's filtered to suit my needs. Which has always been Google's value proposition.

You make some excellent points.

Some of the recommendation engines out there (and it seems everyone has one these days) are really good at figuring out my tastes and preferences. Netflix, Amazon, and hunch.com (now owned by eBay) come to mind. hunch.com recommendations are freaky-good because they ask questions whose core intent is to learn your tastes.

You're right that my friends' tastes are only weakly correlated with my tastes. Assuming my friends and I have the same tastes is an error.

I'd also like to add that the reviews of experts are something I still value over the reviews of others. For example, I'll pay close attention to what Andy Ihnatko has to say about new Apple stuff. Rotten Tomatoes does something interesting in this regard: they keep the expert reviews (e.g. Roger Ebert) separated from the "everyone else" reviews.

If you think about it, a core idea of pagerank was to figure out which sites are most authoritative. Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?

Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?

I think that was Google's project. I think now it's: who is the most authoritative on topic X in a way that's personally relevant to me, even if I have never heard of that person before?

I sort of agree with you on professional reviewers, but I sort of don't. The dilemma of a professional reviewer is that as soon as you're a professional reviewer, you're not really a normal consumer anymore and your experience of a product is going to be very different. (For example, a common complaint about the Android eco-system from reviewers is that it's annoying for each manufacturer's user interface to be slightly different. But a normal consumer who buys a phone and uses it for the length of a contract really doesn't care about this so much as the quality of the skin itself.)

So, basically: I think professional and amateur reviews both have value.

More on topic, though: while I don't really subscribe to the "filter bubble" theory (I still think the digital medium exposes people to way more different perspectives and arguments than pre-digital), I do kind of wonder about the turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of all of this algorithmic ranking. I think it's a subtly different problem.

"Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?"

That question is also answered as part of this launch, as the "People and pages" bullet point. If you're in the fraction of users who this has rolled out to so far, try searching for [jquery]:

https://www.google.com/search?q=jquery

John Resig and Paul Irish are suggested. Try [haskell]:

https://www.google.com/search?q=haskell

Simon Marlow, Don Stewart (Shae Erisson in one reload), and some dude I've never heard of. Presumably Simon Peyton-Jones doesn't have a G+ profile.

Coverage could still use some work, but the feature is there...

Ideally you would have both. There is no reason to choose only one.

In the Amazon case, it might make sense to put your friends reviews atop all the others, so that you can see them in a sea of hundreds of reviews.

But with search engine results, I'm not so sure if personal should automatically mean placement at the top - since so often we've conditioned ourselves to never need to look a few places beyond the top link.

its not an either/or situation. when I'm looking for reviews of a book, or travel recommendation, I'd like to see my friends reviews as well as the top rated public reviews. content from people I know gives me a reference point on how to judge their opinions.

I have to agree with that statement. Moreover this increasing please-dont-confront-me-with-views-outside-of-my-peer-group is problematic. While we embrace tolerance and open-mindedness in society, services like Facebook and now Google Search are increasingly reducing the open character and often randomness of the web by creating separated friend-islands.

I think this is something we naturally do as humans. I've been thinking about "small world" connections lately. People that I know through disparate connections, sometimes via very different parts of the country. Then I think about the similarities... we're all probably in the same marketing demographics, age, wealth, education, ideology, etc... We've self selected to increase our probability of meeting.

It's a small world because we self filter it that way. I wouldn't limit this to Facebook and Google, I'd add any taste-maker or collection sites like Pinterist or Tumblr as well.

I agree that we humans filter ourselves into a bubble, but the recommendation systems are designed to discourage you from doing different. It is in their best interests for you to be as predictable as possible. Getting their recommendation algorithms to be supremely intelligent and nailing your interests is the hard way, meeting the user in the middle by reducing the set and complexity of his interests is the other easier way.

I'm not railing against recommendation engines. They just rely on fundamental assumptions about the nature of our interests that I'm not sure are right. I'd be interested to see a recommendation engine that had an explicitly different goal in mind than predicting your interests (e.g. an in-built bias to encourage you to eat healthier when giving you restaurant recommendations).

Now that's an interesting idea and it seems like a logical next step - first to predict the behavior and then trying to implement a latter of behavior changing steps to ultimately modify it.

But on the other hand I have to admit that the current status seems still highly rudimentary. The service most likely with the most data on me is Amazon and despite an almost 10 year customer history their suggestions are still nowhere near what I am looking for.

If I find an interesting blog post about a vacation on Google+, I can add that author in my "vacation reviews" circle. Further vacation posts by that blogger would also show up on my feed. Why wouldn't that be a good use of personalized results?

I'd like to see both. My friends might not have as comprehensive coverage, and they may not have my exact taste, but _I know who they are_. This allows me to make judgements about their opinions that I can't make with strangers.

It's also generally the case that people will favor the opinion of a few people they know over the opinion of hundreds of strangers. For example, you'll try a restaurant because one friend recommended it, but the threshold for where you'll follow positive Yelp reviews to go to a new place is probably much higher (in the hundreds for me.)

I have to admit, reading the article I went back and forth between being impressed and being slightly freaked out. Best quote from the article that evokes both of those feelings for me:

"This is search that truly knows me."

Do I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"?

> Do I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"?

In a perfect world, where your personal information couldn't be used against you or for someone else's gain, why not? But we don't live in that perfect world. I agree, this kind of thing is scary. Between Google's increasingly lame results (yes I realize this is an attempt to curb that issue) and the idea that Google is and will become increasingly aggressive about knowing who I am, I feel like it's time for me to give up Google.

I still would want to see neutral search results though. If I just find articles where people agree with the opinion I have, I'd live in my bubble thinking that's the way "everyone" thinks.

That's exactly how I felt. A small step, yes, but it's another small step in the direction of "wow, Google knows me better than I do." In the ideal world where corruption didn't happen, this sort of thing is awesome... I'd imagine it'd be pretty nice to be able to Google my life (and friends).

No, but I imagine you want to find what you're looking for. Google knowing about you is part of what makes this possible.

This is the core question of the Information Age. Companies like Google are in position to gather a boat ton of information about you if you're not actively avoiding them. With this information, they can provide "futuristic" services like a global search engine that knows your search preferences and provides contextual advertisements, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a world where, upon arriving at your travel destination, your Android phone indicates the places near your hotel you'll want to eat or drink at. Or, during a month where you've got a lot of Work meetings scheduled, Google Calendar suggests that you and your friends seem to all be free this Friday evening and you could catch the film you've all been posting about. That sounds pretty cool.

But there's a very thin line between "helpful" and "annoying", especially if there's no easy way to opt-out. And there's no way to know if Google is providing your data to governments or large corporations. Who all knows about me, and how much do they know?

At least the future won't be boring.

The future won't be boring - provided that all these helpful algorithmic suggestions don't completely destroy the serendipity that often adds an immense amount of completely unexpected value in the physical world. But I'm sure there's an algorithm for that too.

Do you want Siri to "really know you"? For a service that you want to give you answers as relevant as possible, the answer is probably yes. Although, I'd still like to be be able to choose the de-personalized version, and Google seems to be offering this, too.

Looks like DDG has led the way on some of this:

Don't bubble:

"We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results."

Default SSL:

"That's part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year."

I don't get why they would put a toggle in the upper-right to do this.

They already have search categories in the top-left. In their screenshots, they're on the "Web" tab. Why not just add a new tab representing generic search, make that the default, and leave the web search as it is today?

Making the "Web search" also search your personal data, then giving you an option to make the "Web search" do a non-personalized search just seems backwards to me.

You'd have to double the number of tabs. One each for "Web", "Web Generic", "Video", "Video Generic", "News", "News Generic" etc. etc.

Contrary to DDG, it is really personal content (not ranking) here (i.e. content that might be accessible only to you). I think the ranking is still personalized when you disable Search+.

They say "no personalization of results based on your Web History", which sounds like this affects ranking.

On the help, they say: "On any given search, you can toggle to hide personal results", which is ambiguous.

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

"If you turn off personal results and stay signed in to your Google Account, you won't see results personalized based on your Google+ circles (or suggested connections), Google products, or your search history.

If you turn off personal results and sign out of your Google Account, you may still see personalized results and results based on the context of your search."

You can turn off personalization by appending &pws=0 to the URL.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-disable-goog...

the sad part of this is that Google used to be about being 'open', i.e. open standards and federated services. I like the notion of my indexer containing both public and acld data, but it's very Microsoftish that all the ACLd data has to exist within a proprietary repository owned by the indexer. What would truly be innovative would be a solution that supports crawling of private information on the web including those sites that aren't part of Google.

Completely agree on this. On the other hand, this is also a fault on Facebook's side at not being open with their social graph. If FB had been open, maybe Google wouldn't have had decided to build G+ in the first place...

This is ridiculous. Facebook has a very open API at https://graph.facebook.com that makes nearly all data on Facebook profiles "open" once the owner has granted permission to access that data.

The issue here is that Google wants unfettered access to scrape/index all of that data, or at least the public info and then build a huge business around the copied data.

Facebook isn't stupid. Anybody that would let their biggest competitor walk in, copy their entire database, then build products on top of it with no recriprocal business relationship would be stupid. Google doesn't let people copy their web index, or detailed profiles of everybody on the Internet that indirectly uses Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc.

Google built G+ because Facebook balked at giving the keys to the kingdom to Google basically for free, so they decided from now on their only recourse was to own as much data on their own servers as possible. This contrasts with their old business of passively indexing what they have access to without making huge business deals with third parties that still maintain control over the data Google will increasingly rely upon to stay relevant.

Great in theory, but it's impractical to expect that you're going to get your friends to give access to their FB data so it can show up in your search results. Just awkward.

There is too much money to be made for Google not to build Google Plus.

Yes. This was Google Buzz. The technology behind it was truly great (Salmon, Pubsubhubbub, and friends). It was federated. Everyone took a dump on it every chance they got, despite it being a technically very sound solution to the problem. There's no reason they can't layer in federation now, but it's clear Google is focusing on making the user experience great first because without users, it doesn't matter whether you are federated and open.

I think the biggest challenge they will encounter is the need to re-jigger the notion of what Google does in the minds of their users. When somebody says "Google" a non-techie person will think "internet search engine".

I think it's going to require a bit of time/marketing/something else to reshape the notion of Google as broad internet search engine into "it also searches your personal stuff and also your friend's stuff"

Its hard for me to imagine they'd want to do that at all. The average non-techie only knows about Google because it means "internet search engine." Any complication of this will only bring confusion.

You have to wonder how Bing will respond. Not because they must, but because it's inevitable that they will replicate any major Google Search features...

Here's to hoping they make the social signal (being plussed by your friends) a more important part of ranking a website in the search results. It could really help the non-content sites (read: web apps) that would otherwise have a hard time ranking highly.

""" Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. """

What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links? That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself.

And back to the vacation thingie, no, I don't want "to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations". If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented "vacation experience" that said friends would sit in awe when I'll post my photos online, and you can surely bet I'll not just be a copy-cat. This is how "post vacation photos to FB" works, but this coming from Google with their idealistic and deterministic view on how the world goes it doesn't really surprise me.

> What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links?

That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself. If you are worried about a stalker, not befriending him/her on Google+ and keeping your personal content private are the obvious solutions. I am almost sure that you were being sarcastic, but just in case you were pointing out that this increases the ease of stalkers - well so does nearly every other communication and content publishing (and retrieval) technology ever created. Phones, forums, blogs, smarter search engines, social networks and faster/cheaper internet connections - everything made a stalker's life easy. Knives make it incredibly easy for bad people to hurt others but we do not condemn the man who invented the knife or the company that produces them for it.

> ...If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented...

I, on the other hand, would love to know a place that my friends (whose interest are much similar to me than a general average of the world) loved. It also means that the place would probably be closer to home, or more accessible than the general global destination that the world is talking about. Going to the same holiday destination as a friend doesn't make you less of a individual as you are suggesting. And still if you believe that you want your destination to be unique, then 1998 Altavista would be a better search engine - because whatever popularity metric you choose to rank result, if it is any good it will end up showing a frequently visited and appreciated destination above unique and rarely visited others.

And even if you are correct and I am simply and utterly wrong about this, they do provide a not-personalized search that will give you the vanilla ranking results. I do not thing that they will serve the purpose but they will take you to the DDG like suggestions if you like them. I am surprised that many are not appreciating the changes here, especially after knowing the fact that many had the same concerns that they want Google to give access to not-personalized results!

Would be great if this included my twitter timeline (am amazed Twitter still don't let you search that). Possibly even my Gmail.

A lot has changed over the past month: http://www.fastcompany.com/1800727/former-bing-product-lead-...

This kind of personalized integration is not new, though: Google has had Reader integration for quite some time now, so often searches bring up results from blogs I subscribe to (or at least they did - it doesn't seem to be working now).

For me, this story isn't so much about "Google makes search results more personal" as "Google makes SEO all about using Google+ more". (We now have stronger incentives to use Google+.)

"We now have stronger incentives to use Google+."

Well, I sure don't. This just makes me happy I never started using it.

You may not want increased visibility or findability online, which is fine, but for any person or business who does, these changes from Google mean they have stronger incentives to use Google+.

What happened to organizing the worlds knowledge? This looks more like personalizing the worlds knowledge.

Personalization is just organizing on a per-user basis.

Why do they write this than?

  While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion
  webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family,
  orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology
  enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.

What if I want to know about information I did not know about and find people I do not know? Whats that talk about a single star? What sad and limited view of the world is this?

This is organizing your information. You are part of the world. So it makes sense, no?

It's really just Google Desktop, except with the assumption that you use cloud services instead of storing your data on your desktop now.

How is it not organizing the world's information?

The full statement is "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Making it easier to find and access my own information and information that has been shared with me seems like it fits the mission perfectly.

Taking personalised search to creepy levels: bye bye Google!

I'll use your gmail, but I'm moving to DDG for search.

So you give them your data (by using Gmail), but are opposed to them showing to you what you already gave them?

Clever use of words.

They host my e-mail, I'm opposed to them having my search queries.

They host and mine your emails for information about your interests.

I'm opposed to them having my search queries.

But they already did! It seems you're not opposed to them having you queries, but to them doing something that might actually be useful to you with such queries (as opposed to using them just for ads).

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand not wanting Google to know everything about you, but switching because of this new feature doesn't make much sense, since it doesn't actually change that, just exposes it.

Now, I don't use Gmail nor Google Search but even if I did use one of them, 90% of what I search for on the Internet does not have anything to do with what ends up in my e-mail.

Write a post instead of downvoting me without explaining yourself. I went through my last 20 search queries and found that none of them were related to what I have in my inbox.

I didn't downvote you, but I really don't understand your point at all. Are you claiming that your email is completely impersonal and you don't care who reads it, but your search queries are deeply intimate?

The claim that you are replying to is not that they are getting the exact same information anyway, it's that they are still getting personal information and machines, not people, are seeing it and showing you ads/search results.

I was replying to myself, hoping to get the attention of whoever did downvote me. I did not believe it was you, since you sound like a reasonable person. I apologize if I didn't make that clear.

I also agree with this claim. I still understood the original post as "if they can read your e-mail, they know what you've been searching for anyway". This is simply not true.

Huge implications in many directions...but somewhat moot (value wise) until they get past their early adopter stage. For almost everyone their real social graph is not defined well enough by Google for this to be extremely useful.

Google, you have now gone over to the dark side. The technical definition of "do no evil" was that google search would not promote any single entity based on who they are, rather they would let algorithms and data govern the core ranking. This seems to be the first VIOLATION of this principle. A HACK has been inserted into the core search ranking where if the content belongs to google, it is being given a preferential treatment and higher score. Why should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr? Seems the ranking team is just taking a short-cut by only using the data on google's internal properties in the ranking.. Come on, crawl the rest of the web !! There is interesting content out there..

he technical definition of "do no evil" was that google search would not promote any single entity based on who they are, rather they would let algorithms and data govern the core ranking

Really? Source? (BTW it's "Dont BE evil" not "Do no evil")

Why should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr

Who said it would be?

What search+ does it that it will (possibly) include pictures from Picasa that are not public on the web, but that are owned by or shared with you in your search results.

I'm sure that relevant public photos from flickr will still be ranked and included as appropriate. But I'm guessing that Flickr/Facebook/SmugMug/etc (rightly!) will not be sharing any privately shared photos with Google's web-crawler. So Google can't put those in search results. With photos in Picasa/Google+ we know which ones you are allowed to see and can maintain privacy.

Well! Google is a search engine. So if I search for my name, why should the google plus profile show up first, above the facebook or linkedin profile which probably has a way higher relevance score. Just because you decide to add a widget to detect a name and show the google plus profile as the first result, that to me is hacking the search ranking. From the blog-post, say if you search for music, it might bring up the gplus profile of a famous musician(not even in your circle or friends). Why should it bring the gplus page rather than the myspace page for that musician(which might have a way higher relevance)? That page is public, why don't you show that as the representative page for that piece of information rather than the self-promoted gplus page. It's ok to promote one's own product, all it means is that google search ranking now has a big if-then-else. If google-product, show at top, else push down :p

I guess, my point is that when I come to google and enter a search term, I expect to see all the public information ranked by relevance. Just because you have a different UI treatment for the personalized results doesn't mean that they should get the preferential treatment. When I search for Britney Spears, the google plus, facebook, myspace.. pages for the artist should have equal probability of appearing in that widget/in the search-suggestions(which currently only shows gplus). Let the pagerank/other ranking factors govern which page shows there, don't just hard-code it to be the google-plus page. People are used to google search being impartial and showing the best out of all available information. You can't just show a google plus result at the top and say oh but its in the personalized results widget and not part of the web-ranking.

Honest question: why can't I have a Facebook Connect on Google search?

Do the Facebook ToS allow storing the data for indexing and searching?

What's with Google Blog's line spacing? They've fixed it in Google+, which is much more readable.

Dear google: (1) Stop trying to make the default google search personalized. By default that's not what I want or expect. (2) I don't have so many friends that I need to "search" through what they've done. Quit trying to keep us glued to our computers and focus on giving us solutions that get us off the computer faster.

PS- you're being creepy again

Nobody that I know is interested in this stuff from Google.

It would be better coming from Facebook...

Google is a creepy organization. I recommend private browsing and blocking all Google IPs.

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