51–60 of 104 posts
Does anyone know an easy way to prevent Google from tailoring my search results based off my location? I don't want to use a proxy, because then the results would just be tailored to that (false) location.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A little off-topic, but... Why is this getting down-voted? Is it because you disagree with what this person is saying? I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation. It feels like this is getting down-voted because people don't like that Google is doing these things. So, this person is getting down-voted 'cuz of Google? Huh?
Sadly, Paul Graham has endorsed the idea of using the downvote to express disagreement. I personally dislike this use of the downvote, but it does have official sanction. Read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
There's a dangerous consequence to saying this. Here's how: 1. Voting is easy.
2. Voting is valueable: it literally changes HN for everyone else.
3. Agreement/disagreement is easy: we're taught how to do it as children.
4. Agreement/disagreement is value-less. Saying that you agree with pg on 'Hackers and Painters' is valueless. Saying "prior to reading H&P, I was in mindset A-B-C supported by points of view D-E-F, and here's how they were modified, and here's the new mindset H-I-J" conveys the same agreement, but it provides value.
We shouldn't incite people to use up/down votes to express something value-less. Agreement and lack thereof (alone) is valueless.
> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine. What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer. If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv. Did it pull the one from your state? Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the s…
I did a Google search for "dmv". The first result, an ad, is for Florida, where I live. The next three non-ad based results are for California, Virginia and New York. The fourth (and on) non-ad results are for Florida. A Google search for "florida dmv" returned Florida-based results. What I am tired of seeing are Eames chair ads all over the place. Do one search for Eames chairs, and click on one paid result, and now…
So you click on the relevant link ("happened" to be an ad,) as the Stanford MBAs high five each other at Googleplex. I remember reading a very interesting comment about the incentives of providing the best results and ad revenue. It's clear to me that ad revenue has been winning at Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem of course is that what Google actually IS and what people THINK Google is are two completely different things. Google is an ad company, always remember that.
Google is not an ad company. People just like to say that because they think it's clever or surprising or something. Google does not produce ads. They sell ad space. So does Facebook. So does NBC. These are product companies selling ad space.
Anyone know what proportion of their revenue comes from ad placement on their own product pages?
In fact, I find myself spending less and less time on "Google the Search Engine" because it's gotten so damn good at giving me the right result right away based on the simplest and vaguest keywords (I use the omnibar so I don't even go to google.com anymore). I still remember not so long ago having to try different phrasings of my search keywords a number of times before I would get the result I was looking for on the main page (or in cases of extreme frustration clicking through pages and pages of search results). This is largely not the case anymore.
From my general interactions with people and how they use the web, anecdotal as it may be, they simply doesn't give a shit about ads, filter bubbles and so on. Google Search hasn't changed for them in any meaningful way except that it's gotten a lot better at figuring out what they wanted to find (and in most cases they are not even conscious of that improvement over time).
With regards to other other free G-services (Gmail, Docs, G+, Blogger, YouTube), if you are consciously buying into them, it is implied that you know you are entering into a relationship where parts of the real-estate you're interacting with might be used to display ads and I think everyone understands and accepts that.
I am an avid conspiracy theorist, however, and have more long-term concerns about what happens if Google turns TRULY evil and starts to use its data to spy on citizens on behalf of some authoritarian government. But as of right now I feel a little foolish reacting to this concern in any significant way.
> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine. What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer. If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv. Did it pull the one from your state? Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the s…
> it's just hard to make that big impact on search results with personalization
Trying to make a big impact on something that was more or less working might be the problem. A "don't fix what's not (too) broken" could be a good idea.
For your dmv example, actually, I din't know what dmv is, and my fisrt page (french localized) is about a medicament dictionnary for doctors (DMV, didn't know it either).
"dmv usa" doesn't get me the dmvusa.org result firt either (it's the one I get on the US google)
This seems to be the best example of why geospecific data can be widly irrelevant, and using the default setting, I get this kind of unusable results for half of what I search.
> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine. What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer. If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv. Did it pull the one from your state? Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the s…
I did a Google search for "dmv". The first result, an ad, is for Florida, where I live. The next three non-ad based results are for California, Virginia and New York. The fourth (and on) non-ad results are for Florida. A Google search for "florida dmv" returned Florida-based results. What I am tired of seeing are Eames chair ads all over the place. Do one search for Eames chairs, and click on one paid result, and now…
Then when you visit other google properties, google automatically gives you ads from that Eames chair site.
It reminds me of HN itself. I don't want to know what the "average" likes to read, or even what people like me like to read. I want to know what smart, interesting people (not me!) like to read. In other words: I want curation by an expert, not the average of everyone's inputs. Google is supposed to know the right answer, not ask all my friends what the answer is and report back.
The thread recently where Jordan Mendelson (napster hacker) chimed regarding Napster's back end is the quintessential example of what I'm talking about.
I agree Google has gone into a filter bubble, but the article very speculative and provides no statistics or examples to make a good point. This is a pop-science article, so I don't have high expectations.
> "They make changes to the user interface and collect more data, analyzing what they've got to see what users "liked" more." I find this so utterly naive that I am incredulous. Google is a business. They don't tweek results based in favor of user preferences. They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in. It's not an accident that [in the US] http://www.google.com/search?q=weather pro…
This is entirely false, and I wish misinformed people would stop parroting it. There's an extremely rigid firewall between the ad side of the company and the search side. People working on search don't even see metrics on how their changes effect ads, let alone make decisions based on them.
When I want change the way ranking works, there's a big stack of statistics I have to collect. None of them involve ads. All of them involve how useful the results are to a user.