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Google: Search, plus Your World

googleblog.blogspot.com

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#31
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"?

This is the core question of the Information Age. Companies like Google are in position to gather a boat ton of information about you if you're not actively avoiding them. With this information, they can provide "futuristic" services like a global search engine that knows your search preferences and provides contextual advertisements, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a world where, upon arriving at your travel destination, your Android phone indicates the places near your hotel you'll want to eat or drink at. Or, during a month where you've got a lot of Work meetings scheduled, Google Calendar suggests that you and your friends seem to all be free this Friday evening and you could catch the film you've all been posting about. That sounds pretty cool.

But there's a very thin line between "helpful" and "annoying", especially if there's no easy way to opt-out. And there's no way to know if Google is providing your data to governments or large corporations. Who all knows about me, and how much do they know?

At least the future won't be boring.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#32

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'.

If you just log out of your google account search should be fully 'de-personalized' right?

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#33
post #9

Taking personalised search to creepy levels: bye bye Google! I'll use your gmail, but I'm moving to DDG for search.

So you give them your data (by using Gmail), but are opposed to them showing to you what you already gave them?

Clever use of words.

They host my e-mail, I'm opposed to them having my search queries.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

If you just log out of your google account search should be fully 'de-personalized' right?

That would be up to Google. They still know your IP address, general location, browser, OS, etc. and can use that to "personalize" your search results.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#35

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'.

You can always compare with http://scroogle.org/. Though I sometimes wonder if its results have been "personalized" for a collective mind.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#36
post #24

> Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web. No, they are not. What's meaningful to me are the experiences of people (anyone) who have been to where I'm thinking of…

If I find an interesting blog post about a vacation on Google+, I can add that author in my "vacation reviews" circle. Further vacation posts by that blogger would also show up on my feed. Why wouldn't that be a good use of personalized results?

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#37
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"?

This is the core question of the Information Age. Companies like Google are in position to gather a boat ton of information about you if you're not actively avoiding them. With this information, they can provide "futuristic" services like a global search engine that knows your search preferences and provides contextual advertisements, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a world where, upon arriving at you…

The future won't be boring - provided that all these helpful algorithmic suggestions don't completely destroy the serendipity that often adds an immense amount of completely unexpected value in the physical world. But I'm sure there's an algorithm for that too.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#39
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

If you just log out of your google account search should be fully 'de-personalized' right?

And use pws=0.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#40

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 thos…

Completely agree on this. On the other hand, this is also a fault on Facebook's side at not being open with their social graph. If FB had been open, maybe Google wouldn't have had decided to build G+ in the first place...
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