People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it.

I think people just hate the idea of change. Look at the Facebook UI redesigns. Every time they do a major change, people freak out and scream bloody murder for about 3 or 4 days, even if the new design is better than the old.

Something similar is happening for Google with both this and their ToS changes. They're largely improvements, but many people hate the thought of partially relearning or adapting to a new or changed system.

I generally think moving people from old to new is best, even if they cry about it. The trick is to ignore the ones complaining for the sake of complaining while addressing legitimate grievances.

>> People don't hate personalized search

> I hate personalized search

That's what it's about. Just a counter example to a sweeping statement.

Although, now it seems that "personalized search" might mean different things to different people; I'm not only talking about Search Plus Your World. I've had to go to extra trouble to get google to show me results not tweaked for Norway. I mean -- I still get to hate it if it is optional, as long as it is bothering me, don't I? :)

As a matter of fact this causes google.com to take me to google.no, contrary to what my settings say (that are active when I'm not in an incognito window). This is also independent of what my browser language preferences are.

I'm not exactly sure if this poisons my search results or not, and I am too tired to look into it right now. But it still makes me worry that I'm seeing skewed search results.

Additionally, it is of couse extra work to open an incognito window for every search, so this still means Google's attempt at tailoring the results for me causes me bother.

He talks like the statistics from 2004 have anything to do with the latest social search changes. There have been a lot of complaints and a lot of fuzz about the new privacy policy and the latest updates to personalised search, but do people really want it? I certainly don't, every time I've had a social result from Google+ come up, it was something useless.

Today I was looking up how to set a field to unsigned integer in mysql (result: you can't), and a post of mine where I mentioned MySQL pops up. Well thank you so much, what I already knew is what I was NOT looking for. I'll use Google+'s search if I want to find a post on Google+.

Also I may be the exception, but ever since I tried DuckDuckGo I liked it more and more. This is mostly thanks to that it's the default search engine in Linux Mint (I figured I should, as a good software developer, get some experience with Linux--probably going to switch to another distribution soon though), but since today I also have "d keyword" bound to duckduckgo search in Firefox on my laptop and at internship. It just works great for most things I search for.

Social search... yeah many things have been said about it, but a classic example is the restaurant. Wouldn't you want to get restaurants near you, rather than one in Iran (let's pretend that is a top ranking one)? Well, no, absolutely not. If I want a restaurant nearby, I'll open up Google Maps on my phone, zoom to the range I want to search within, and search for 'restaurant'. Or if I can't do that, I'll simply Google for 'restaurant city-name'. This localization is also rendered useless when you want to find a restaurant to take your girlfriend to and you are not whereever you would like to take her. Oh and don't forget that Google can't really find the location of most desktop computers, it will only work on laptops and mobile devices when they share their location.

The only possible benefit I can see from this is that you don't have to type the city name when you mean the city you're currently at. Still though, I'd like it better if Google suggested "Did you mean: restaurant [current city]" instead of assuming that's what you meant.

I'd like to see how many people prefer Google's search now against how many prefered it 6 months ago. That's about the timeframe they really started releasing more social products.

"Old" and "new" don't describe intrinsic qualities, they're just indicators of what sequence things arrived in, which is something wholly orthogonal to the value or utility of the things in question.

Yes, people may often be uncomfortable with change per se - but if it's fallacious to presume that change is always bad, it's equally fallacious to presume that newer is always better.

Much of the criticism of Google's recent changes describes valid objections to the nature of Google as a tool in its present state, not just complaints that it's different from what they're used to.