51–60 of 83 posts
For me, this story isn't so much about "Google makes search results more personal" as "Google makes SEO all about using Google+ more". (We now have stronger incentives to use Google+.)
Well, I sure don't. This just makes me happy I never started using it.
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…
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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…
I think that was Google's project. I think now it's: who is the most authoritative on topic X in a way that's personally relevant to me, even if I have never heard of that person before?
I sort of agree with you on professional reviewers, but I sort of don't. The dilemma of a professional reviewer is that as soon as you're a professional reviewer, you're not really a normal consumer anymore and your experience of a product is going to be very different. (For example, a common complaint about the Android eco-system from reviewers is that it's annoying for each manufacturer's user interface to be slightly different. But a normal consumer who buys a phone and uses it for the length of a contract really doesn't care about this so much as the quality of the skin itself.)
So, basically: I think professional and amateur reviews both have value.
More on topic, though: while I don't really subscribe to the "filter bubble" theory (I still think the digital medium exposes people to way more different perspectives and arguments than pre-digital), I do kind of wonder about the turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of all of this algorithmic ranking. I think it's a subtly different problem.
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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 b…
What happened to organizing the worlds knowledge? This looks more like personalizing the worlds knowledge.
Personalization is just organizing on a per-user basis.
While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion
webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family,
orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology
enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.
What happened to organizing the worlds knowledge? This looks more like personalizing the worlds knowledge.
It's really just Google Desktop, except with the assumption that you use cloud services instead of storing your data on your desktop now.
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 I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"? In a perfect world, where your personal information couldn't be used against you or for someone else's gain, why not? But we don't live in that perfect world. I agree, this kind of thing is scary. Between Google's increasingly lame results (yes I realize this is an attempt to curb that issue) and the idea that Google is and will become increasingly aggressive…
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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?
It would be better coming from Facebook...
Google is a creepy organization. I recommend private browsing and blocking all Google IPs.