They Did It: Google Personalizes Search & It Is Not Evil | Hacker News Reader

They Did It: Google Personalizes Search & It Is Not Evil

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63 pointsjonmwords32 comments

Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest.

Didn't google revolutionize search over a decade ago by doing exactly that?

I see what you mean. But at that time, Google results weren't tied to personal identities, which had no clear definition yet, and that's what this whole Google+ project has been about.

This includes Google+ content but not GDocs/Gmail content? If Google wants to really personalize my search and discovery I want universal tags. Let me browse my content by tags across services. If I have 2 documents, 1 contact and 3 emails tagged (labeled) 'HN' I want to be able to go into gmail (or some other page) search label:HN and see all 6 'things'

Enable 'Apps Search' from here:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#settings/labs

I thought that facebook would be the first to come out with personalized search. It is so interesting watching the Big Four poke and prod at each others moats. It will be watching to see how everything pans out in the next 10 years.

He's basically saying he overstated his claims in the previous article by conflating current implementation with how things were going to be indefinitely.

As a writer and content-producer his whole notion of 'evil' seems to be tied to identity and attribution. Discussions on this page about privacy are independent of that. In fact there's two meanings of privacy even on this page: leaking your private data to your friends, and concerns about how much Google knows about you.

I wish we could talk about these three issues separately, skipping increasingly-content-free words like 'evil' and 'privacy'.

Discussion on Google's announcement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3447048

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..

"It is not evil".

Keep telling yourself that.

Google is selling you to the world, and this is just one more way to get you on their site and making money for them.

"If you're not paying, you're the product" still applies, I agree.

That's a naive quote. You are the product, yes, but you're also the customer. Google has to appease you to keep you. Without a balance between consumer and advertiser, Google won't make any money.

This is only a valid point if people are aware of what is going on and make an informed choice.

I'd don't think this is true. Consider Internet Explorer. People used it because it was there. Even with better alternatives people used it. It took a fair while to educate users.

People use Google because it's the default search engine. They could get away with having only momentum. Appeasing users would then be unnecessary until a real competitor comes along.

i'm not sure how being able to click personalized or regular search is not evil

it's data they have, data they use. what you choose to see doesnt have much to see with it.

i don't think they're move evil than yesterday, but they're not less either

(basically agreeing in greater lengths hehe)

And? What's evil about advertising?

Seriously, I'm surprised to see this kind of comment ranked so highly on HN. Google makes products. Most of them are good, some of them are excellent. In exchange, they show you ads. The alternative is making the user pay. There's nothing wrong with this arrangement; it's the default monetization strategy for a huge number of companies.

The core of the argument seems to be that Google knows too much about you, and is selling your personal data to advertisers. That's not really the case, though. Google isn't going to ESPN and saying, "Here's John Smith from Deerborn, Michigan. He's 38, has a wife and a 4 year old daughter, and cheats on his taxes. Give me $50." They're simply allowing advertisers to target users fitting a certain profile. Now, you may not be comfortable with how much Google knows about you, and that's fine, but targeted advertising is hardly evil.

Your comment greatly changed my views on advertising.

Totally agree. "You are the product" is such a reductive, partisan talking point that at this point it's actually a pretty good filter for intellectual honesty and critical thinking.

I wrote a whole blog post about it here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9910020865/you-are-the-produc...

I'd rather pay a trivial amount of money for their service than be forced into a global information gathering scheme whose sole point (currently) is effective advertising.

It's frustrating that they've gobbled up some of the best programmers in the world to make some of the best software in the world--

And then enforced the rule that you can't use their software without being spyed on.

Why not let us pay for software?

Call it what you want, I call it evil.

Might this be a trojan horse? This feels like what Facebook does... they announce a feature which raises public concerns about privacy, then they play it down a bit on the first release and then proceed to push it as originally planned on a subsequent iteration.

Well, if you read my post last week, you know I'd be the last person to let them off easily, but now that they've put this opt-out control in, they can't well take it way. That would be suicide.

It would be suicide to do it now. What about in some months, when everybody has forgot about the debate and most of the users are constantly logged on google+ and use the feature as their standard search? Again, Facebook does it all the time and manages to pull it off on a regular basis.

I can't think of an example of Facebook taking away a preference setting that users have adopted. Even Facebook doesn't take away controls it has freely given. It would be one thing to take away the toggle button. That might happen, and it would suck if it did. But to go in and pull out a user setting that people are using, that would be astonishing.

How about the ability to hide your friends list from people you aren't friends with?

Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That was a long time ago.

Google search is great.

Everything else is done better by someone else.

OK, can you tell me better alternatives to gmail, youtube, gdocs?

...and to Google Maps, Google News, Google Voice, Google Chrome...

I reject your premise.

Further segregating the echo chamber of the internet is not a good thing.

I agree, this is further shrinking the 'bubble.'

But here's the thing: this actually lifts the lid on the echo chamber to be more open than it was yesterday. Google recognizes that global search is a necessary option. Before this update, it looked like G+ was just going to be rammed down every Google user's throat. Now we can opt out without having to log out!

I agree with you. Prior to this, the only way to get global search was to add &pws=0 to the URL. Now, it's a button. It's a big step forward, and not that I don't like the "bubble", it has its advantages (increased relevance). It's fantastic to be able to switch between the two modes at the click of a button, and it's something we didn't have before.

It's not just a button, either. You can opt out entirely from preferences.

Further, the ability to swap back and forth between personalized and unpersonalized views makes the differences visable to users in a simple immediate way, so we can each make our own mind up about the tradoffs between relevence and "echo".

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