This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation of it. An unpersonalized search engine is much better than this thing that simply hides any interesting content from you in favor of showing you something related to your previous search or to whatever nonsense your neighbors look up. Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer.
I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.
I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language.
Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested.
The idea of a filter bubble is definitely worth addressing, but I see no reason why getting more information music notes when I'm trying to search for information about C# is remotely beneficial. I can use Startpage or Incognito if I want to avoid filter bubbling, but for the vast majority of searches I do, relevance to me is useful.
But it's not best addressed through fear-mongering. Don't call it a child's imitation just because you don't understand how it could be useful.
The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?
Contrast that with [did dinosaurs live] which has a mix of creationist and normal results, despite meaning the same thing.
But this is part of the problem, isn't it? You might not get the anti-vax information, but others will see that instead of REAL information.
And, be honest with yourself. Some of what you do want to see would be considered clickbait by others, it's just that Google already knows you well enough to show you things that fit your own world view.
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/googles-search-algorithm-steal...
> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information.
Health information should not be considered political stuff. Unfortunately, it is ... at least in some countries.
You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is.
Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't.
You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is that "If I search for something in Seattle, it would be stupid to return results in Chicago"? Probably not.
My webdev friend was excited that her personal site was being returned in her search results whenever someone searched a project she had worked on. I suggested that google was serving her personalized results. She searched in incognito. Her site was still being returned. Pretty good, right? She was getting exposure.
When we used a VPN, she was not in the results. Google knew that our searches came from our IP address, and that searches from our IP should include her site, since she mostly visited her site from our IP. Or something along those lines. Either way, it was a misleading worldview.
I'm going to be harsh for a second, but I mean this lovingly: Stop being naive. It's important for us to be skeptical of Google. They're the thousand-pound gorilla, and the moment they do more than wink and nod at their "Don't be evil" philosophy then we should start getting scared.
How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?
Google process literally trillions of searches per year, with each search taking a few milliseconds. You're asking them to make a complex tradeoff between providing completely irrelevant results for some queries and excessively personalised results for others. I don't disagree that they could probably do a better job of making that tradeoff, but I don't think that they're being malicious or negligent either. I think that they're making perfectly reasonable engineering decisions given the constraints of scale.
I don't think I am being naive. I don't blindly trust Google. I think that there are many important questions to be asked about how major internet companies collect, store and process our personal data. I think that America urgently needs to pass legislation equivalent to our General Data Protection Regulation. I think that there are significant concerns about the quality of information that people see online, but I think that publishers play a far greater role than Google in this respect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
What about applying it to non-transactional stuff like news? Should it personalise results based on what it thinks I like?
Again with subjective/objective distinction — I know my friend will tailor movie recommendations to me based on mutual interests / past discussions.
I expect though that a library catalogue would point me to the same info on global warming no matter who I am.
The trouble at the moment is that Google is conflating these two types of interaction & the user doesn't know which of their queries are personalised (and to what extent / based on what criteria).
> How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?
In my opinion, this is the crux of it — are we happy with algorithms filling this blank unfettered, based on their own learning. If not, it's something that we have to discuss and agree on, and then enforce / bring visibility to.
At present, Google aren't negligent (legally anyway, as we haven't set any bar) and may not be acting maliciously. But if we think change is necessary (at least for visibility of what's happening under the hood), we need to ask the questions around these services to drive that change
https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...
My takeaway is that the whole thread of the first comment should be collapsed, which is usual for HN. Important topics get ignored or derailed.
In our case, I just think it's interesting that my webdev friend was trying to ascertain truth about the world -- "is she associated with the project she worked on?" -- and the answer came up "yes!" for her even though it was "Nope" for the rest of the world.
Sure, it's an interesting question of which tradeoffs they should make. But as users, it's not really our responsibility to be concerned about that. All we know is that Google is acting a bit strangely.
To be clear, if Google stayed how it currently is, I'd have no problem at all. I'm just worried that google can go from strange to malicious at the flip of a switch. It's unsettling that they're the only realistic option. DDG has been picking up steam, but hopefully they'll do more than nip at Google's heels.
What evidence do you even have that they didn't go malicious? And how could you gather such evidence if you don't have any?
>>I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered.
Some people are saying that restaurants shouldn't be personalized.
I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc.
Similarly, having some basics about your geographic location, spoken language, etc. would seem to be quite helpful. If only to help separate out things like that there are 8000+ "Park Street" in the US when I type in an address and Google gives me the one closest to my location.
grumble grumble chef knife, chef cookbook, chef recipe, chef cucumber incoherent mumbling
So without thinking I type record plane 1939-1945 into Google. And guess what? I get information about hand planes, pictures of hand planes in the images section, links to ebay auctions for vintage planes etc, and in between these there were only a few results related to aircraft combat during WWII.
The same query in incognito mode doesn't return even a single link related to hand tools.
For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!
In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.
Do use the header, but always be open for the user changing the language too.
Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.
It's also very useful for learning new things.
Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless.
I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability.
I think about that every time I go off to incognito to make Google stop hobbling my results and give me the thing I was actually trying to find.
Yes I do believe it's up for grabs.
Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1]
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...
&pws=0
My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it".
Why wouldn't they put a button like that? At what point did optionality and customization of your user experience become undesirable to the point that you need to obfuscate or prevent it?
My guess is that too many people read Don't Make Me Think as dogma and now we're in a world where the tech industry assumes they need to do all the thinking for anyone that touches their product and the users brought up in this world have no idea what it's like to not have their UX dictated to them.
They already have a button that would cause far more confusion if accidentally pressed (Feeling Lucky) since it results in a page that isn't a set of google search results.
Sorry, gotta say that those are pretty weak counterpoints... I expected something about how Google's business interest has everything to do with personalized search and each non-personalized search would result in less revenue, or something like that.
I can't guarantee it still works, either.
And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge.
Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it.
That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.
yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful information than Google for problems I search for.
Plenty of times Google returns me THE SAME results for different, but similar query, I change 3 from 6 words (to synonyms), and I get the same very results, that are irrelevant to my problem and query. I see them because they have best SEO and meta keywords and 5 stars under the title, or because they are similar to what I searched for 15minutes ago.
I found a bug in Android UI. I spent almost a day looking for a solution or tips how to do that thing. Google was literally useless, it could just show me links from SO that people had the same problem, google-based mailing lists, but no fix. I searched for the same thing in DDG - BANG - first result was from some crappy blog that author couldn't spell words properly, it was looking like websites from early 00's. I had a source code solution for my problem. Google shows me what Google wants me to see, well optimized websites, nice looking, fast loading on mobile, sites that cooperate with google big data plan, sites that use GA, Google Ads and AMP.
I don't want magic personalized results based on suggestion of a vibrator I was searching for 2 days ago, I want most relevant results to what I search for now.
Some of this may be the “what I’m used to” factor though. Maybe I’ve just habituated to expect the results I’ve gotten from DDG. Either way, I don’t miss Google. I used to DDG out of principle; now I DDG because it works better.
I mostly miss google when searching for physical locations, but the !g comes in handy there.
Anyway, google ignores synonyms if you use double quotes around each word or phrase.
The problem is; we taught Google how to look for whatever information we seek by seeking it. We taught it that we are too stupid to include location information in our searches. We taught it what is spam and what is not. That's our "not spam" choices accumulating as a service over time. That's our own translation suggestions. We gave them away freely.
And now that we would like to back off and reclaim our knowledge and our mutual effort to make Google the giant it is, we can't. We are already anonymized and productized. We can't reclaim the spam filter we helped create and run it on a private server. We can't take back the combined translation efforts. Our own places and exploration data is Google's forever, with no way for us to learn from it.
Google has made some missteps, but they've arguably done more to change the world and society than almost any other company in the last 50 years. They made the internet accessible to the masses.
Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".
>If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport
Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect".
>if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed.
Google "cricket sport".
"We will track your every query, movement, voice command, and whatever other behavioural data we can get our hands on, put it in a gargantuan centralized database, store it for as long as we can (practically forever) and have trillion-dollar artificial intelligence munch on it so you can avoid using accurate search queries" is a ridiculous value proposition.
Pretty much what's happened really. Turns out not that many people want Google Search when they have the choice of Google Secretary instead.
How do you know? Popularity of Google Search is an indication, but its not like people decide which search engine they use when they install Google Chrome. Do you think ordinary people are even aware there's an alternative to Google Search such as Duck Duck Go?
If I search "takeaway pizza [place of residence]" on a non-localised search engine, I get nothing. If I search "takeaway pizza [nearest large town]" I get a bunch of places that don't deliver to me. Google gives me what I want, which is a list of the dozen or so pizza places in the patchwork of villages and towns in the surrounding area.
Google could give me that sort of result without any personalisation, but it would need to do another contentious thing - fuzzy matching. It needs to understand that when I search for [place of residence], I actually mean [place of residence plus everywhere within a certain radius], but only in some contexts. It needs to search the index not for the exact words in my search term, but for what it predicts will give me the most useful results.
Again, this stuff is literally Google's job. I don't want to do the mental work of figuring out all the towns and villages within a five mile radius, I don't want to perform a bunch of different searches, I just want to see where I can get a decent pizza. Google shows me all the local places on a map, complete with reviews and opening hours. If I search on mobile, I can choose a place and call them or get directions with one tap. If I ask for directions, it'll warn me if there's traffic and offer me an alternative route.
If you can't see how 2017 Google gives far better results for this query than 2007 Google, then I can only assume that you're being wilfully ignorant.
This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the town name because that town doesn't have a post office.
It's usually just not straightforward.
People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.
You Google "pizza Springfield." For a very literal ("stupid computer") search your results are all the pizza places on the east end of Springfield. There's no pizza in the west end of Springfield.
You waste your time calling all the pizza places on Springfield just to find out none deliver to your location.
Your results do not include all the pizza places on the east end of Shelbyville that do deliver to the west end of Springfield.
You go hungry.
This isn't an uncommon situation if you're outside of the downtown. In your example you're going to assume that every pizza restaurant near your location is a national chain that has locations in every town. Completely and totally unrealistic unless you are in a very densely packed suburbia - there is only one chain pizza restaurant within ~20 miles of my house but there's independent ones everywhere.
>People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.
Google provides a useful service. So I shouldn't use it because...? Because why? it's more "manly" not to? Because search should be hard because that's the way nature intended? or... ?
What kind of logic is that? Following that logic nobody should use the web at all because it makes things easier. Or you shouldn't get delivery at all because it's convenient, you should just drive around aimlessly until you find pizza.
We've been so conditioned to use Google Search as our one stop oracle that we fail to stop and think whether a text-based query is actually appropriate.
Note: I have hast a few instances where "near me" didn't work as expected.
Personally, I would do the search on maps and not include either the city name or "near me", but the discussion was about the regular text search and I was suggesting an alternate phrasing.
I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites?
What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprecision.
If I search for an English error message, I.. search for that message. If I search for a Dutch person, I look him up on the Dutch Wikipedia if he's well-known enough.
There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top.
Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.
You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.
Add "lang:nl".
>Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.
Look up the restaurant on https://www.tripadvisor.com/. Why would you use a general purpose search engine if you already know where to find the right information? Or you could add "lang:en" to your query.
>You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.
Those expats could add "lang:en" to their queries about the places you have blogged about.
I am not denying that there is some value in Google filling in these blanks for you, but 99% of examples about the indispensability of personalized search are rendered moot with very simple additions to the search query.
What part of the parent's argument is invalidated by the need of some outlier doing "lots of language switching" to add the language?
the trick with Google, when its "language detection" isn't play well, is to add `hl=en` as a query param to the URL. This works on basically all Google properties as ewll.
Searching for my current location is probably the worst possible default
Also, a system that adapts to its users is generally more successful than a system that requires users to adapt to it.
Moreover, proper education across the whole population requires, well, a country with proper education across the whole population. So you might have luck in some Scandinavian countries, but not at global scale.
Manipulating "uneducated" users is much more profitable.
What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?
Technology shouldn't be magic. People should understand, at least at a basic level, how the internet and search engines work, among many other things. Knowing to search for "cricket sport" shouldn't be arcane knowledge. People willing to allow companies to collect personal data and feed them data without understanding how it works end up living in bubbles such as the ones that got Donald Trump elected for instance.
If everything comes cheap and easy to access (like fake news) and people are sufficiently uneducated to accept them as truths, manipulation becomes much easier. Personally tailored search results are just a small part of the issue. It makes people trustful and dependent on services that might end up betraying them in the end.
Google: "An uneducated consumer is our best product."
The short-term consequence of using cocaine is euphoria, but we do not encourage cocaine use because for most users the long-term negative consequences vastly outweigh the short term benefits.
Likewise, we may want to consider what the long-term consequences of relieving our users of certain cognitive labors are. If we will guess for them what information they want, if we tell them what to read, if we tell them what news is fake, if we decide for them what they might like, are we empowering them to make their own choices, or are we increasingly (whether intentionally or unintentionally) directing their lives?
I get the value proposition of Google Search, just like I get the value proposition of Velcro shoes and microwave dinners. The problem is not with the face value of these technologies, but with their assumptions and implications. In spite of Silicon Valley rhetoric, these technologies do not empower and liberate their users but make them dependent on them. The more you outsource your thinking to algorithms, the more vulnerable you are to being controlled by them.
Haha, if my mother needs to navigate to a URL, she opens Google, types the URL there, then clicks the topmost result (not kidding ;-)
I completely agree that we are on a slippery slope when it comes to technology that tries to be so smart that we don't have to think for ourselves anymore. I sincerely fear for the future of society if I see how easily people are already influenced and cognitively limited by their dependence on technology. We are turning into a society where expending effort to learn and understand things has to come from purely intrinsic motivation, which means a very significant cross-section of society will never acquire basic skills and intelligence we've taken for granted for ages. Imagine the day there will be no Google to help them out, for whatever reason...
Edit: One analogy that comes to mind, which is sort of a pet peeve of mine and is (IMO) side-ways related to the perils of making things 'too convenient' for people, is giving people 'too many options' to choose. I see a parallel between giving people 'choice and options', and 'making things convenient' by removing the need to think for yourself. Everybody agrees that choice is good, and everybody likes convenience. But if you treat these almost as religion, you get 1001 kinds of toilet paper which are probably all shitty (pun intended), instead of three choices that are actually different. The same goes for convenience. Too much convenience will have unintended side-effects.
People parse, trust and communicate with supposedly objective sources differently from supposedly subjective ones (e.g. the BBC v Breitbart) and dislike when the latter is presented like the former.
(You can change location on the bottom of the desktop page, and you may be able to unset some other targetting settings, but these are buried somewhere and not clear to the average user. Changes in T&C's also seems like a constantly moving target)
And still, you can peek at the "not personalized" and "not local" results with `Tools > Verbatim` (as opposed to default `All results`) option:
https://www.google.com/search?q=takeaway+pizza&source=lnt&tb...
You sir are the product. By constantly telling you are the median, you shall become the median.
More Median People === More Profit$
Great article. "You Will Not Understand This." how appropiate.
If I want to find local takeaway pizza, than all I need is to find where am I, and then to add my location to a request. Probably I wish to use not the text prompt search engine, but maps.google.com or some other tool dedicated to searching for local things.
But if I'm trying to find basic information on topic not common for me, than I would have troubles with personalized search. And the worst case happens when I don't realize than I'm looking for information that is not common for me: when I know this fact I can do something with search query to make it uncommon and to hope that it will break personalization, but if I don't know I would do nothing special, and I will risk to miss a whole segment of Internet which contains heaps of information relevant to my needs. It is the same story as with FB and political views of users but at wider scale.
It is really hard to find something new for me. I use DDG for several years for this single reason. I have no strong emotions to ads, because I use NoScript and uBlock: ads are not a problem. But narrow results space is a problem.
That's a bit of an empty statement. I assume it also looks at the other terms, or your previous searches (from your IP or Google Account). Because there might be a time where you are searching for a person Ruby (the capital letter gives it away) or a gem called ruby.
Google has very good spam filtering, but their lack of human controls or support make it impossible for the little guy to get resolution in many cases where a spam score may be undeserved.
So, I'm curious, am I just extremely lucky to have competent sysadmins as neighbours on the colo subnet, or is my IP address' reputation so good that it never gets affected by collateral damage?
Last week I had a copyright discussion, so I looked up "Do I own the copyrights to my art?. First link was "creator or buyer: who owns the art?", second link was "does deviantart own my art?", the third link was a website called "desiring god" about copyright and the scripture...Sure, you can say the first link is relevant, but I never mentioned "buying" in my query, and the fifth link is the one that truly answers my question. It says that artists in the US have automatic copyrights to their work as soon as it is completed. Same things have happened where I search up a more complex query, and google throws me buzzfeed links and other stuff that have nothing to do with it, in its attempt of simplifying what I'm looking for.
I searched for "takeaway pizza" but didn't get a local match for pizza delivery, so I changed my search query by adding more keyword qualifiers
> takeaway pizza in san jose
Works!
> cricket
I actually _wanted_ to search for the sport so I added additional keyword qualifiers to bypass all the Cricket brand results
> cricket sport
Works!
It's like how I know I must use "Golang" or even "Golang Stackoverflow" to find relevant results to my query -- I didn't need all the "personalization help" that Google likes to offer -- I'm actually capable of crafting decent search terms.
There should be some "wiki/stackoverflow" type search engine, where would be no other algorithm but users voting the goodness or badness of a link for a given search term. (and of course, some housekeeping) Maybe also a way to indicate that hey, you are using an ambiguous search term. Do you maybe mean washington the state, dc or president?
Their job is to make money. When the user is searching with an intent to buy it doesn't pay to return the most relevant results, it pays to return the most profitable results.
It only pays to return relevant results (because it builds the brand), when it is clear that there is no intent to buy.
While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale.
Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results. If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport; if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed.
Google's "broken" email service came to dominate the market because it offered a vastly better user experience than the realistic alternatives at the time - Hotmail, AOL or some crappy POP3 server with no real spam filtering. The things that people hate about Gmail are all rational, defensible design decisions that serve the majority of users well.
The internet is a big place. Most statistics suggest that there are about 3.5bn people regularly using the internet. If you're optimising your service for the median user, there will be millions of outliers who hate your service with every fibre of their being. If you hate something, it might be irredeemably awful, or it might just not be for you. It's all too rare that people entertain the latter possibility.