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Google: Search, plus Your World

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Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#11

Post by JeremyBanks »

To me, the biggest part of this announcement is this:

We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.

Google's slowly been making their results more personalized, without having an easy way to opt-out (if you use a Google account). Now that there's this prominent option, I'm less bothered by them adding more personalization by default.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#12

Post by loeschg »

epaga wrote: post #2

I have to admit, reading the article I went back and forth between being impressed and being slightly freaked out. Best quote from the article that evokes both of those feelings for me: "This is search that truly knows me." Do I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"?

That's exactly how I felt. A small step, yes, but it's another small step in the direction of "wow, Google knows me better than I do." In the ideal world where corruption didn't happen, this sort of thing is awesome... I'd imagine it'd be pretty nice to be able to Google my life (and friends).

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#13

Post by mayanksinghal »

paganel wrote: post #5

""" Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. """ What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links? That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself. And back to the vacation thingie, no, I don't want "to learn from the experiences your…

> What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links?

That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself. If you are worried about a stalker, not befriending him/her on Google+ and keeping your personal content private are the obvious solutions. I am almost sure that you were being sarcastic, but just in case you were pointing out that this increases the ease of stalkers - well so does nearly every other communication and content publishing (and retrieval) technology ever created. Phones, forums, blogs, smarter search engines, social networks and faster/cheaper internet connections - everything made a stalker's life easy. Knives make it incredibly easy for bad people to hurt others but we do not condemn the man who invented the knife or the company that produces them for it.

> ...If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented...

I, on the other hand, would love to know a place that my friends (whose interest are much similar to me than a general average of the world) loved. It also means that the place would probably be closer to home, or more accessible than the general global destination that the world is talking about. Going to the same holiday destination as a friend doesn't make you less of a individual as you are suggesting. And still if you believe that you want your destination to be unique, then 1998 Altavista would be a better search engine - because whatever popularity metric you choose to rank result, if it is any good it will end up showing a frequently visited and appreciated destination above unique and rarely visited others.

And even if you are correct and I am simply and utterly wrong about this, they do provide a not-personalized search that will give you the vanilla ranking results. I do not thing that they will serve the purpose but they will take you to the DDG like suggestions if you like them. I am surprised that many are not appreciating the changes here, especially after knowing the fact that many had the same concerns that they want Google to give access to not-personalized results!

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#14

Post by koalaman »

the sad part of this is that Google used to be about being 'open', i.e. open standards and federated services. I like the notion of my indexer containing both public and acld data, but it's very Microsoftish that all the ACLd data has to exist within a proprietary repository owned by the indexer. What would truly be innovative would be a solution that supports crawling of private information on the web including those sites that aren't part of Google.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#15

Post by tonfa »

ximeng wrote: post #10
tonfa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to DDG, it is really personal content (not ranking) here (i.e. content that might be accessible only to you). I think the ranking is still personalized when you disable Search+.

They say "no personalization of results based on your Web History", which sounds like this affects ranking.

On the help, they say: "On any given search, you can toggle to hide personal results", which is ambiguous.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#16

Post by hack_edu »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #6

I think the biggest challenge they will encounter is the need to re-jigger the notion of what Google does in the minds of their users. When somebody says "Google" a non-techie person will think "internet search engine". I think it's going to require a bit of time/marketing/something else to reshape the notion of Google as broad internet search engine into "it also searches your personal stuff and also your friend's s…

Its hard for me to imagine they'd want to do that at all. The average non-techie only knows about Google because it means "internet search engine." Any complication of this will only bring confusion.

You have to wonder how Bing will respond. Not because they must, but because it's inevitable that they will replicate any major Google Search features...

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#17

Post by josefresco »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #11

To me, the biggest part of this announcement is this: We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results. Google's slowly been making their results more personalized, without having an easy way to opt-out (if you use a Google account…

How far does this 'de-personalization' go? Do they still factor in user agent, screen size, geography etc.? I would guess that even an anonymized Google search is still fairly 'personal'.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#18

Post by ximeng »

tonfa wrote: post #15
ximeng wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say "no personalization of results based on your Web History", which sounds like this affects ranking.

On the help, they say: "On any given search, you can toggle to hide personal results", which is ambiguous.

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

"If you turn off personal results and stay signed in to your Google Account, you won't see results personalized based on your Google+ circles (or suggested connections), Google products, or your search history.

If you turn off personal results and sign out of your Google Account, you may still see personalized results and results based on the context of your search."

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#19

Post by sssparkkk »

Here's to hoping they make the social signal (being plussed by your friends) a more important part of ranking a website in the search results. It could really help the non-content sites (read: web apps) that would otherwise have a hard time ranking highly.
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