How long until a search engine gets sued for discrimination?
When there is a position so dominant such as Google's or Bing/Yahoo's, I think it's natural to think that a case of discrimination, if well motivated, could be taken seriously.
If there was something that was sort of unifying before was the search result. That depended on what I searched and some algorithm, but it didn't depend on who I was.
Now things are slightly shifting towards a personal search. Google already said that eventually the local search won't be possible to deactivate. In addition to that the search is becoming more and more related to social network results (what your friends searched or commented on) and if Facebook will play a role in it I'm sure this will only become more relevant to search results.
Now, if I live in a specific area and I have specific friends, wouldn't this slow down my search for something different or prevent me from finding something different from what you would expect me to being looking for being a resident of an area and having certain friends?
This might seem too abstract but there is actually a million possibilities. It all goes back to the fact that now the search engine won't treat me anymore as anyone else, but it'll guess what I like or want based on my neighborhood and my circle of friends (read: if I lived in a wealthy/safe town my search would be different than if I lived in a poor/higher-crime area).
I think the solution could just be to have a couple of "dimmers" on how 'local' or how 'social' I want my search results to be.
After all, I don't need any locality or sociality if I'm searching for topics involving food in general, while I might like to have more local/social results if I want to know about what good food I could eat near where I am.
This could start from local/social but could be extended to more parameters of the search algorithms. For example, it would be so helpful to get rid of all the forums sometimes or limit my research to the forum in other occasions...
Isn't it better under all points of view (and it wouldn't even be hard for the users) to allow them to easily choose which parameters are more important to them in a search as opposed to guessing a series of parameters that work for everybody?