Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found the Google employee.
You should see how I defend Facebook or Apple.
What's good for facebook and apple is good for google?
Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
61–70 of 131 posts
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#622018 was the year I adopted ddg, not because of privacy, but because google result sucks. Almost every time I search, I don’t get a single result I want on the first page. The first 3 results are sponsored adds, then there is the Danish Wikipedia article (useless), then 3-6 advertisements pretending to be content, and then if I’m lucky something that was relevant 5 years ago. DDG isn’t much better, but it’s better. I…
I use DDG out of principle but to be honest Google is still much better for the stuff I am searching.
DDG is more convenient for getting to something you already know exists: either use a bang to get there directly, or make your query specific enough that it comes up in the search result page.
On the other hand, when I expect my search engine to make a best effort guess about my intentions, I just use the !g bang, and almost always Google finds stuff that DDG misses. This is essential for research, but downright annoying otherwise (especially considering all the linkfarms like WikiHow that have spammed their way to the top of PageRank).
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode. I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and my experience is mixed. The problem with google is that sometime you search for something new and then you see the bubble very clearly, which applies non only to search but also to youtube (maybe even more). The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching…
I keep on trying to love duckduckgo but find that often even typing the exact title of an article I'm looking for, it's not on the first page of results...
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine. One place it drops the ball is in searching for anything health related. Top of the page: homeopathy, conspiracy theories and supplement salesmen.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 recipe…
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...
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obvious difference being state sponsored actors from a foreign entity weaponized this “feature.” Not sure how you’re equating the two, but it’s disingenous.
If the entity is uncovering a fact then what does it matter whether it's a foreign or domestic entity who uncovered it? The fact itself is what's interesting. I get that an entity could be more interested in uncovering facts about one party than another but in this particular case, the fact was that the Democratic Party was acting "unethically" in some people's eyes. If they hadn't been then it wouldn't have "influen…
> If the entity is uncovering a fact then what does it matter whether it's a foreign or domestic entity who uncovered it?
How's that even a legitimate question? I can list a few reasons why it matters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Russian_Fede...
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#66Google 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…
This is all well and good for information retrieval, but people are making decisions based on information from search results.
In your vegetarian example, what if 51% of people were vegetarian in an area, and the general population was making decisions off these "localized" search results. We would likely expect that this would influence the minority to the tastes of the majority.
This might be fine for something like vegetarianism, but what about other topics? Should your search results be more racist because you live around a lot of racists? This is best case.
I have tangentially worked with groups that specifically utilize this to provide public opinion sway and consumer capture for their clients.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#67Google's feed does an amazing job of avoiding filter bubble. One of the best in the industry actually. I use the product and wrote a blogpost about it: https://getstream.io/blog/google-feed-personalization-and-re... It makes total sense for them to personalize search results. If I am searching for Django it's the framework not the musician. When I search for a restaurant name it's the one in Boulder, Co, not a restau…
I worry it ropes me into my domain and way of thinking, without a way of getting out of it.
I also would likely mean the web framework, but if I suddenly become interested in Django music one day, I don't want Google to make assumptions.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#68To 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…
> Lastly, the insinuation of the article is that "unbiased" search results are clearly preferable. the insinuation is that you should know if they are biased or that you should be able to get unbiased result if you so wish. It also raises suspicions on how much google tracks each user. From this point of view what would be interesting would be a local study, to see in 100 people all in the same neighbourhood with dif…
Unbiased compared to what?
Let's say you have three search orderings: ABC, BCA, and CAB. Which one is the unbiased one?
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 recipe…
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.
Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you post an example? I’ve been using DDG for years, and have never encountered this. Also, the DDG devs are certainly lurking on this thread, and can fix the class of queries in question.
No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.
I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.