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Google: Search, plus Your World

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Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#41

Post by flyt »

danmaz74 wrote: post #40
koalaman wrote: post #14

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...

This is ridiculous. Facebook has a very open API at https://graph.facebook.com that makes nearly all data on Facebook profiles "open" once the owner has granted permission to access that data.

The issue here is that Google wants unfettered access to scrape/index all of that data, or at least the public info and then build a huge business around the copied data.

Facebook isn't stupid. Anybody that would let their biggest competitor walk in, copy their entire database, then build products on top of it with no recriprocal business relationship would be stupid. Google doesn't let people copy their web index, or detailed profiles of everybody on the Internet that indirectly uses Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc.

Google built G+ because Facebook balked at giving the keys to the kingdom to Google basically for free, so they decided from now on their only recourse was to own as much data on their own servers as possible. This contrasts with their old business of passively indexing what they have access to without making huge business deals with third parties that still maintain control over the data Google will increasingly rely upon to stay relevant.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#42

Post by nextparadigms »

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"?

Do you want Siri to "really know you"? For a service that you want to give you answers as relevant as possible, the answer is probably yes. Although, I'd still like to be be able to choose the de-personalized version, and Google seems to be offering this, too.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#43

Post by BrentonG »

Huge implications in many directions...but somewhat moot (value wise) until they get past their early adopter stage. For almost everyone their real social graph is not defined well enough by Google for this to be extremely useful.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#44

Post by icebraining »

nodata wrote: post #33
icebraining wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They host and mine your emails for information about your interests.

I'm opposed to them having my search queries.

But they already did! It seems you're not opposed to them having you queries, but to them doing something that might actually be useful to you with such queries (as opposed to using them just for ads).

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand not wanting Google to know everything about you, but switching because of this new feature doesn't make much sense, since it doesn't actually change that, just exposes it.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#46

Post by ErikRogneby »

stfu wrote: post #30
bambax wrote: 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…

I have to agree with that statement. Moreover this increasing please-dont-confront-me-with-views-outside-of-my-peer-group is problematic. While we embrace tolerance and open-mindedness in society, services like Facebook and now Google Search are increasingly reducing the open character and often randomness of the web by creating separated friend-islands.

I think this is something we naturally do as humans. I've been thinking about "small world" connections lately. People that I know through disparate connections, sometimes via very different parts of the country. Then I think about the similarities... we're all probably in the same marketing demographics, age, wealth, education, ideology, etc... We've self selected to increase our probability of meeting.

It's a small world because we self filter it that way. I wouldn't limit this to Facebook and Google, I'd add any taste-maker or collection sites like Pinterist or Tumblr as well.

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#47

Post by troymc »

joebadmo wrote: post #26
bambax wrote: 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…

I disagree. Because the things I value are different from the things everyone else values in a vacation. Same reason I can look at the bestseller list in Amazon and be completely uninterested in most of the titles. That's not to say that I have the same taste as all my friends, either. But it's true that their experiences are often much more meaningful, if only because I know them well and understand how they would c…

You make some excellent points.

Some of the recommendation engines out there (and it seems everyone has one these days) are really good at figuring out my tastes and preferences. Netflix, Amazon, and hunch.com (now owned by eBay) come to mind. hunch.com recommendations are freaky-good because they ask questions whose core intent is to learn your tastes.

You're right that my friends' tastes are only weakly correlated with my tastes. Assuming my friends and I have the same tastes is an error.

I'd also like to add that the reviews of experts are something I still value over the reviews of others. For example, I'll pay close attention to what Andy Ihnatko has to say about new Apple stuff. Rotten Tomatoes does something interesting in this regard: they keep the expert reviews (e.g. Roger Ebert) separated from the "everyone else" reviews.

If you think about it, a core idea of pagerank was to figure out which sites are most authoritative. Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?

Re: Google: Search, plus Your World

#50

Post by sp332 »

Fizzer wrote: post #7
ximeng wrote: post #3

Looks like DDG has led the way on some of this: Don't bubble: "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." Default SSL: "That's part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signe…

I don't get why they would put a toggle in the upper-right to do this. They already have search categories in the top-left. In their screenshots, they're on the "Web" tab. Why not just add a new tab representing generic search, make that the default, and leave the web search as it is today? Making the "Web search" also search your personal data, then giving you an option to make the "Web search" do a non-personalized…

You'd have to double the number of tabs. One each for "Web", "Web Generic", "Video", "Video Generic", "News", "News Generic" etc. etc.
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