Google is FUBAR

How sure are you that it is an option? I followed the link you gave, went to search settings (here: http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en) and found no option to disable it. I went to the dashboard and attempted to find an option for it, but did not see it anywhere. At this point I am under the assumption that while this may have been an option, it's been removed -- and if this is the wrong assumption to make, then all I can say is that it should not be this difficult to find it.

> Could you point me to the obvious internal disquiet?

It was to this [0] article I was referring. I don't think he was misrepresented, but the Larry Page quote was really beside the point.

Edit: reworded the paragraphs below for clarity

> impending but vaguely characterized misuse of that data.

There have already been a number of occasions where either Google's network was compromised [1], a rogue employee has misused data [2] or users have had their accounts hacked [3] en masse. And of course, on top of this, various government and intelligence agencies have had access to your data [4].

None of that should be the least bit shocking or surprising, because such outcomes are inevitable when a large company holds so much data. I'm not going to blame Google; none of those incidents served their interests and indeed compared to most companies Google are unusually transparent and responsive about these issues. But knowing that these things will happen regardless of their good intentions, Google should seek to minimise and not maximise the amount of data they hold on us.

> > Once they have the data and it's been mined for further meaning, it's inevitable they'll find new uses for it.

> This does not seem at all self-evident to me.

Perhaps I should have said, "it's inevitable they'll find new ways to make money from it". They're a company, after all.

> In fact, it seems to me that Google's incentives are such that it's pretty much in their interest to use the data well. [...] And they have every incentive to keep their users' trust.

Well, we could say that about any company, and yet abuses occur regularly. If you set a companies profit motive against the best interests of it's customers, the cost of a breach of trust will simply be factored into the equation. Unfortunately it is frequently the case that while a breach of trust may be costly, it's not always costly enough.

I don't think there's anything exceptional about Google here. They're not immune to corruption. Google has served us so well so far because our interests are aligned; it's the surest way to prevent an abuse of trust in the future and why I'm so concerned about their new strategy.

[0] http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-y...

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01...

[2] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-14/tech/29992918...

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/01/google-hack...

[4] http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/

A UX lesson I just know: It is better to have options than unchangeable defaults.

Another UX lesson: do one thing and do it well. Apparently Google forgot that. I still think it is a great one. And yes, I know it pertains to the function software plays and web empires are a different beast, but I find the poetic irony of the down the rabbit hole fiasco being related to a *nix quib delicious.

> As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux.

My email isn't very useful because I don't subscribe to mailing lists. But somehow I end up being there and I keep trying to get rid of them with the "unsubscribe" and if that doesn't work I start reporting them as spam. But the point is, essentially, no matter if you do a scan of recent emails of emails from a longer period of time there's a lot of stuff that I WAS NEVER INTERESTED IN to begin with.

More frequently I've been deleting these emails and the only emails that stay are photos (when your relatives don't quite use FB you do send photos over using Gmail) and other personal conversations. My friends and family don't program but I do, and enjoy doing so. But that never shows up in Gmail.

Even if I WAS subscribed to mailings lists, when I'm mostly Python and PHP - I would love to hear about Node.js when that suits my situation. I've nothing against learning new things. In fact, that's my second objection to you learning how I behave _now_. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER NEW THINGS - DON'T TRY TO KEEP ME IN MY SHELL. (Sorry, had to use caps. I think there was a TED talk as well on this. Keep the world open - not limited - don't build walls around my current tastes to limit my future tastes.)

> For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos.

I like watching videos of lions and whatever little footage of tigers in the wild that's there. I love those kind of cats, yes. But I never really was interested in a jaguar. I like watching Top Gear but that doesn't happen on YouTube. But if I search for Jaguar, then most probably I'm looking for the car - but since you don't know what TV I watch you are going to get it wrong. Again, don't take this as a specific case but what I want to highlight is that you will never have enough information about what I consume because Google isn't the source of even, say, 70% of my consumption. I consume more from HN than from Google-originated sources for example.

This. If they were actually guessing wrong, they would just stop guessing. Even if they didn't employ mostly geniuses, they would know to compare their models against random chance.

But my guess is, their models will actually do considerably better than random chance. I find google searches massively more helpful than duckduckgo searches not because ddg isn't a good search engine, but because ddg isn's snooping on me and just doesn't already know that I work a lot with such-and-such CMS.

And this is really all much ado about nothing, since if google were to ever overfit and render me unable to find something that it thinks is not my usual interest, I would just browse right back over to ddg.