Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
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Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#2Does Google constantly run AB tests on links to see which has higher CTR in given positions?
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#3To make this research more interesting I'd like to see:
1) repeated queries from the same user. Do the results stay constant over time or do they change?
2) comparisons to the same experiment run against e.g. Bing or DuckDuckGo.
It seems to me that some variation in results is to be expected because of users hitting different backends which might be at different stages of index rollouts. Similarly, response times of different backends matter. If for example the video results don't come back in time you'll end up not having them in the result set.
Lastly, the insinuation of the article is that "unbiased" search results are clearly preferable. I'm not convinced. I for one like that STD for me is associated with the C++ standard namespace (which I search for all the time) rather than sexually transmitted diseases (which I luckily don't have to care about as much).
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#4> Back in 2012 we ran a study showing Google's filter bubble may have significantly influenced the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by inserting tens of millions of more links for Obama than for Romney in the run-up to that election
Thank god someone is discussing this. I think it's a real shame that the "media" is focusing only on the 2016 election is discussing how Trump manipulated voters. Sure, they ran advertisements (and Russia did), but the reality is this is no different than any of the recent elections.
Obama was right at the forefront of this tactic:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...
Yet, when Trump does it (perhaps better executed, or the platforms are better) it's "manipulating an election!"
Please, continue this research and keep it unbiased.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#5Google can and should customize search results based on location, and it's not just about "local articles" as the article suggests. If enough people from the same general location click on certain results more frequently, then those results should rank higher for others who search from that same general location.
We use Google because the results are useful, not because they are "unbiased". Ranking implies some sort of "bias" and is what makes search results generally useful. We don't want a search engine that does nothing clever and just spits back unranked results. Otherwise, we would be inundated with results containing credit card scams, porn, Bitcoin scams, Viagra ads, etc, when we search for... pretty much anything.
In privacy (incognito and not logged in) mode, all of the above still applies. What would NOT apply is something like: You are a vegetarian and suddenly all of your restaurant searches rank vegetarian restaurants higher in results while in privacy mode. Unless, of course, for some reason people in your general location happen to mostly eat vegetarian.
In any case, if people don't like it, stop using Google and go use some other search engine; there is absolutely nothing holding you back. More times than not, I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#6> Back in 2012 we ran a study showing Google's filter bubble may have significantly influenced the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by inserting tens of millions of more links for Obama than for Romney in the run-up to that election Thank god someone is discussing this. I think it's a real shame that the "media" is focusing only on the 2016 election is discussing how Trump manipulated voters. Sure, they ran advertisem…
Trump's not even mentioned in the article.
In fact I would even buy a filter bubble if it had a "Not Trump" switch.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#7> Back in 2012 we ran a study showing Google's filter bubble may have significantly influenced the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by inserting tens of millions of more links for Obama than for Romney in the run-up to that election Thank god someone is discussing this. I think it's a real shame that the "media" is focusing only on the 2016 election is discussing how Trump manipulated voters. Sure, they ran advertisem…
Trump's not even mentioned in the article. In fact I would even buy a filter bubble if it had a "Not Trump" switch.
The point the GP is making is that it's the 2016 election (involving Trump) that is usually brought up (though not in this article) when it comes to filter bubbles as opposed to the 2012 election.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#8A small quib: filter bubbles don’t require using personal data. But they are about giving readers what they want.
In a very different context, I ran an analysis of terrorism coverage in the NY Times to measure what a geographic filter bubble looks like:
How Media Fuels Our Fear of Western Terrorism
https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
I also ran the same analysis for all the articles over a decade by geography (and compared to population, GDP, etc):
Visualizing 10 years of International Coverage in the NY Times
https://www.nemil.com/s/nytimes-international-coverage.html
While filter bubbles are more pervasive in digital media (where we can segment each user, including with personal information), they’ve also always existed.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#9> Back in 2012 we ran a study showing Google's filter bubble may have significantly influenced the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by inserting tens of millions of more links for Obama than for Romney in the run-up to that election Thank god someone is discussing this. I think it's a real shame that the "media" is focusing only on the 2016 election is discussing how Trump manipulated voters. Sure, they ran advertisem…
"Yet, when Trump does it ..."
How about when a foreign state, an enemy state at that, does it?
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#10Google can and should customize search results based on location, and it's not just about "local articles" as the article suggests. If enough people from the same general location click on certain results more frequently, then those results should rank higher for others who search from that same general location. We use Google because the results are useful, not because they are "unbiased". Ranking implies some sort…
What you're saying makes sense for location dependent results (e.g. searching a map of nearby places). For something like "origin of the universe" results would be very different across the world. What happens when I'm in a location I'm not usually in? Do I get the local results or the results for the place I usually reside?