There Are No “Regular Results” On Google Anymore
Hey I love personalized, custom search results based on my previous behavior. I mean who wouldn’t what Google to attempt to provide the best results based on my previous history? But I still find this stunning beyond words. DuckDuckGo found that even if you “turn off personal results” as an option and ALSO sign ouy of your Google account you are still getting custom search results.
The results came from an “experiment” DuckDuckGo ran in September involving 131 volunteer users in the U.S. and from “a variety of countries” internationally. The users, who weren’t signed into Google, did Google searches for the three chosen politically-themed terms — “abortion,” “gun control,” and “Obama” — and send in screenshots of their search activity to Weinberg and the DuckDuckGo programming team.
The result was a wide variance in the resulting links that Google displayed, according to DuckDuckGo’s experiment. For example, in the case of searches for “abortion,” some users received information on Obama’s public stance on abortion, while others did not. Some users also received information on pro-life activist Gianna Jessen while others did not.
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To be fair, Google’s own online documentation is up-front that the company will not be delivering signed-out users “regular results,” that is, non-personalized search results. As Google’s “Turn off personal results” page states: “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.”
I got issues with this on so many different levels I don’t know where to start. Lets just say for sake of conversation I believe Global Warming is a fact. I search for it a lot to learn more about the topic. Google logs this, notes I click on sites that tend to agree with and/or reinforce my belief. So what if I want to do a search and get results that go directly against my views to gather input and learn what the other side is saying?
How much harder would it be for me to find relevant results?
I don’t want to live in a bubble, an echo chamber. And this is just one of many, many examples I could use to highlight the issues with Google doing this!
Tuesday’s Interactive News
Today’s edition of quick hits that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to you:
And your geek link of the day:
Monday’s Interactive News
Today’s edition of quick hits that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to you:
And your geek link of the day:
Thursday’s Interactive News
Today’s edition of quick hits that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to you:
And your geek link of the day:
A professor once told me his trick to happiness: treat your hobby like a career, but more important. Those of us who eat up all types of hobbies—from comics to video games to DIY projects—know that a good hobby can be one of the most enriching parts of life, but they can also require a lot of time and money. Here’s how to better budget that time and money.
