11–20 of 27 posts
Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience 1. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com 2. Set the default search engine to: https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.
This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline. The fact that personalized search applies to political topi…
I'm planning on blogging a bit on this particular topic tomorrow. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll try to address them. I don't think the gTrends argument works though (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741590 ). Most of the results inserted are super-recent (and so I expect the recency of the trends data -- like the last 90 days -- to dominate). Of course it is all a black box so who kno…
Your point about Google trends is counterintuitive but evidence-supported, which makes it particularly interesting. It may well be that they are looking at outcome measures after search personalization, and abandoning personalizations that yield no results. Or perhaps a certain volume is required over time for a particular query before triggering an automated personalization trial. As you say, it's a black box, so who knows.
Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience 1. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com 2. Set the default search engine to: https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.
Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately -- though is a good start at protecting yourself.
Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience 1. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com 2. Set the default search engine to: https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.
> a person who searches for "Harry Potter," and then for "Amazon," actually wants "Harry Potter" results from Amazon.com Inc.
For my case, this would never be true. I would simply append "amazon" to the original search. Now, I could probably train myself to not do that, but I don't want to. I don't want my search engine to have any kind of state, but unfortunately Google thinks I want the opposite.
I guess I want Google to be purely functional. The same query will give the same answer, no matter who asks it and no matter where in the world it's asked. I certainly don't want Google to create a little filter bubble just for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately -- though is a good start at protecting yourself.
Sorry, meant to say depersonalize. Care to expand why this doesn't work? Just ran the same test, and I see the exact same results.
In fact, on fresh private mode browsing (cookies cleared) when people searched for the same result at the same time, we still saw significant variation in results, even in the same country and on non-location results.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
"...In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers..." I hate to continue the political thread, but "biased" doesn't quite cut it. Algorithms don't automatically make everything magic. There is a structural issue that just saying "it's the algorithm" doesn't explain or address. No doubt the data leans that way because Obama has been…
Since the incumbent has already campaigned the previous election, fairness dictates that he shouldn't be allowed to campaign at all against the challenger.
This is pure nonsense. Algorithms are written by humans and are just as biased as their creators.