Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by ergothus on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @01:36PM (#18611072)

I have Google routinely deciding that I didn't mean to use ALL three words I searched for and "helpfully" dropping them. Sure, I can tell it "no, I really want those", but the experience is definitely becoming more and more sub-par for me. As bad is when a search doesn't give me what I want, so I narrow it, only to find that Google uses my previous search to decide what I want to see so I still end up finding similar results.

I remember when Google blew us away with Page Rank (goodbye Alta Vista!), but in the last few years Google has gotten so good on providing entry-level information that it's useless for finding specifics, so I expect the next Big Thing in search to come along, though I have no idea how far out it is.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by kibwen on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @01:46PM (#18611167)

Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"?, which shows a different set of naan recipes).

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by noxToken on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @02:12PM (#18611422)

Although the tailored results have been useful, I think I still like the days back when you needed search operators. I was once looking up stuff about electrons (the particle). A plain query of electron only returned results for the framework on my first page. Understandable.

The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in addition to Wikipedia. Rarely are Wikipedia results in my organic listing unless I specifically add wiki or Wikipedia.

By the way, this[0] is how to search your query.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=ways+to+make+%22nan%22+-%22n...

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by dhimes on Thursday December 06, 2018 @08:08AM (#18617683)

Interesting. Wikipedia what my top result when I DDG'd "floating point operations that produce NaN"

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by mda on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @02:49PM (#18611772)

Did you try your own sentence "floating point operations that can produce NaN." "Making nan"is a very tricky query, because it has no context that is related to floating point. I think it is not fair to expect anything else. If you give a slight context like "operations that make nan" you will get results.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by barbecue_sauce on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @03:39PM (#18612278)

Yeah, "ways to make nan", even being familiar with the domain, is an extremely unintuitive way to phrase that query.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by millstone on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @03:31PM (#18612209)

Holy cow that's bad. It says: Showing results for ways to make naan. Search instead for 'ways to make nan'.

Fair enough, so click on the Search Instead and it says "Did you mean: ways to make naan" and then shows a bunch of links about breadmaking anyways.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by Drdrdrq on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @04:30PM (#18612779)

You can use: ways to make +"nan"

Disclaimer: didn't test it, but I often use this trick to force G to use some word, and to use it exactly as written.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by dwd on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @05:02PM (#18613092)

Google dropped support for + years ago but you could try using -naan and "nan".

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by nzjrs on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:36AM (#18616125)

OMG, well that could've been made more known. Wonder what the cumulative cost to my life has been.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by Drdrdrq on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:36PM (#18620733)

Ha, what do you know... :D I actually always use startpage.com, but since they are using Google, I assumed they passed this query to it. What is interesting is that this trick still works on startpage.com while it doesn't on google... I must say I'm even less impressed by Google search than I was before. It's getting worse and worse.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by dhimes on Thursday December 06, 2018 @08:09AM (#18617687)

wow I didn't know that

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by sanowski on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:35PM (#18615445)

a search for your question "all the floating point operations that can produce NaN" gave useful results for me.

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by ape4 on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @06:43PM (#18613936)

Its too bad it ignores the case of NaN (and other queries)

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Re:Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing ... by 00N8 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:26AM (#18616295)

idk, but I think they employ multiple tokenizing strategies, including case insensitive, case sensitive,by words, by n-grams of letters...

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