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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

#81

Post by barbecue_sauce »

mda wrote: post #69
kibwen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#82

Post by hrktb »

alopecoid wrote: post #5

Google 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…

> Google can and should customize search results based on location

I feel more and more these ideas of optimizing for 95% of the use cases give good result on paper but shitty lives for the 5% left.

I understand the good intentions behind that calculation, because making life easier for a huge majority of people should be a good thing.

But for instance boosting local results is one of the way you’ll make people often searching for foreign information miserable. Searching for remote places will most of time be met by random local businesses first. Web based international content will be outranked by local content, and your local newspaper bitching about heat waves when it’s just summer will outrank by far rock bands and manga titles.

Sometimes that’s the wanted behaviors, but for instance currently Google already works with strong preference for localised search, and that’s one of the things that pushed me to DDG.

In a way if Google wasn’t so massively successful I’d root for them to better serve mainstream searches. But in the position they are now I think it’s harder to say they should just care about the vast majority of people. Even 1% of their userbase is an incredibly huge number.

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

#83

Post by onemoresoop »

eksemplar wrote: post #18

2018 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 feel the same because of the YouTube changes, I used to browse videos and end up in unexpected places. That is no longer possible, i get only related videos that are either sponsored, older videos i haven't finished and nothing else. I personally am not grumpy but am actually happy that I spend less time on YouTube. Slowly but surely I spend less and less time online and I see it as a good thing.

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

#84

Post by onemoresoop »

acd wrote: post #36

I have a theory that filter bubbles are causing intolerance to other peoples views. Ie most of the content we consume are through filter bubbles. In other words that most people consume content that are tailored to them. Thus we have less acceptance of things that are not similar as we are less exposed to different content. Filter bubble examples: Search services: Google, Bing Movies: Netflix Music: Spotify, Apple Mu…

That's exactly what they're causing because you have no easy way to search outside your bubble and end up thinking that's the status quo in fact dis-informing you by omission.

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

#85

Post by xte »

Few sparse consideration: "push to extreme effect" or when you see something that marginally interest you but keep seeing it because of "customized" results substantially invite you to dig deeper and in case of some kind of results push people to the extreme like when you search a thing from a left or right party and in few time you get more and more "lefties" or "rightish" contents.

That's may not influence too much normal, acculturated, adults but may influence young and unacculturated people, thinks for example at modern urban legend like "white sugar is poison", like "chemicals trails" and they "tam-tam effect".

Another point "censor effect": we know well that a search based information access is less detailed than a taxonomy based one, we experience that often when we organize our mails, documents, files, alternating taxonomy and search based UI. When our entire world will relay on search based UI instead of taxonomy who control search may control knowledge. So it will became easily "hide" something, "push" something else etc.

Normally this is not a problem, it start to became a problem when very few search system became so ubiquitous and dominant.

"convergence": tied to the first, think only about feeds vs aggregators. With feeds you search for specific stuff and stay up to date while you tend to ignore thing not interest for you. With aggregators this "soft polarization" effect get somewhat lost substituted by another (potentially driven) "hard polarization" effect. As a result general information became less diverse (any publisher try to be at top in any aggregator result instead of follow their style) and people became more "extreme" in their information interest.

That's have far more implication than mere privacy. And if you add to the sauce the actual communication systems status like Whatsapp, GMail etc...

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

#86

Post by Drdrdrq »

kibwen wrote: post #60
ergothus wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

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.

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

#87

Post by c3534l »

ggggtez wrote: post #68
kiriakasis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The one that isn't selected based on your identity.

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

#88

Post by iscro »

alopecoid wrote: post #5

Google 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…

People wanted and used google precisely because it was "unbiased" and "unlocalized". It's why it became so popular.

The only reason for the biased localized results is due to corporate pressure from media and news industries.

Also, you are conflating localized and unbiased results with spam and scam. Nobody is saying google shouldn't remove scams and spam. People are just saying they want unbiased results.

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

#89

Post by dwd »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #86
kibwen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

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

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

#90

Post by PavlovsCat »

krrrh wrote: post #39
PavlovsCat wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not creeping me out, it's disgusting me. When I want to look for django reinhardt, I can look for "django music" or whatever, if I want the framework "django web framework" should do the trick. Oh, and and when I add a + before I word I want that word to show up, if there are no results with that word, show me no results. I'm fine with others having the option of personalized search, I'm not fine with me not hav…

Just in case you aren’t aware, google deprecated the + operator years ago. If you want to ensure a single word is in your results you can put quotation marks around it. It mostly works.

Wait, why are you downvoted? I wasn't aware, and you helped me greatly. I wish HN would offer a way to just order comments by date and make flagged/downvoted things collapsed, the end. People playing political tug of war with comments in conversations they don't even partake in is just annyoing.

Karma-free HN could be a browser extension. We could call it nirvana or something.

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