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Comment by qiqitori | Hacker News Reader

You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)

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Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood.

Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology.

Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.

I just add another keyword to narrow the search result. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted results based on anything other than the query.

Can you show me what results you see for “locking”? I see dancing move in all profiles I have.

Wow you're right. Locking dance moves and videos.

Weere you expecting to see padlocks or doorlocks or what?

I expected to be “personalized”. I’m definitely more into programming than dancing. I see 0 personalization tbh. And I tried a few different peoples phones.

Oh I see, locking in the programming sense, yes. Either not every search term is personalized for your context, or else this particular search is being applied to some other demographic. But that's weird because "locking" doesn't also show door, windows, filing cabinets.

Anyway if you search for "programming locking" you get relevant results.

Google didn't used to do this. Anyone got a rough idea when this started?

I was defending personalization in general, not saying that google is doing a good job of it now (see last paragraph of my first comment).

Personalization would be good if it meant recognizing that I dislike blogspam, SEO'd pages, advertisements, and assuming my location.

I often find myself searching for information that's not from my locality. This sort of 'location personalization' frustrate such efforts so much that I rarely 'google' these days. What's the point of having access to the internet if that access is going to be restricted like this without consent? If they want to make my search experience more relevant, they should provide me an option to limit my search, rather than callously assume my intentions.

It's much more egregious on the Android play store. Many apps like banking, transportation and online shopping apps are geolocked for installation, sometimes even without the developers' request or knowledge. What if I'm flying over there in two days, or just want to help someone who's already there? And even when I'm there, I have to prove my presence by supplying the local credit card details! Nothing else is enough - not GPS, not cell tower IDs, not the IP ranges or whatever else.

This is just outrageous because I can't even get a device that I paid for, to work for me. This is just sheer arrogance at this point - a wanton abuse of their co-monopoly privileges. However, I'm not under any delusions that they're here to improve my digital experience. These corporations profit by restricting their "users'" experience on an otherwise fully open internet.

Search results are still location-specific even if you disable personalization.

For the better part of a decade it seems that every verb or noun I search for, all the top search results are some movie or TV show named after that verb or noun. And I've watched exactly two movies in the past two decades (Star Wars VII when it came out, and Alien just last week).

Sometimes I consider actually enabling personalized search just to get to the things that I'm actually looking for.

I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

> Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature.

Speak for yourself. I've worked in several "Kafka-esque" software organizations.

Arguably Google SERPs are getting closer to The Trial.

Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.

> I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.

The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.

Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc.

And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.

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