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Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

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Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#111

Post by striking »

Larrikin wrote: post #98
rayvy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching for something specific or something you saw months ago and don't remember well then google's index and tracking can be useful. At this point I don't treat search engines as some sort of dichotomy (Google or DDG or Edge, etc). Rather, I try to use them as a nice blend : Google for when I'm throwing darts at the dartboard and have no idea what I'm looking for, DDG…

Sounds like it would be nice to have a resurrection of Dogpile with a combination of Google and DDG.

You can use the !g bang to search Google from ddg.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#112

Post by jondubois »

I'm surprised to read that the number of clicks drops by 50% if the result moves down a single rank. Personally, I rarely click on the top link. I usually click somewhere in the middle of the search results on the first page.

I understand why the result page number matters but the exact rank having such a huge impact is surprising.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#113

Post by jondubois »

I don't think that search personalization is all bad though. It can be used for both good or evil.

If search results were perfectly consistent, some smaller websites might not get any search traffic at all and most big corporation websites would get all the traffic. It would greatly exacerbate winner-takes-it-all effects and inequality.

Personalization allows for some small websites to start with a niche and slowly grow to become more mainstream.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#114

Post by nzjrs »

dwd wrote: post #89
Drdrdrq wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use: ways to make +"nan" Disclaimer: didn't test it, but I often use this trick to force G to use some word, and to use it exactly as written.

Google dropped support for + years ago but you could try using -naan and "nan". https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

OMG, well that could've been made more known. Wonder what the cumulative cost to my life has been.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#115

Post by Zarel »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #32
tschellenbach wrote: post #26

Google's feed does an amazing job of avoiding filter bubble. One of the best in the industry actually. I use the product and wrote a blogpost about it: https://getstream.io/blog/google-feed-personalization-and-re... It makes total sense for them to personalize search results. If I am searching for Django it's the framework not the musician. When I search for a restaurant name it's the one in Boulder, Co, not a restau…

It's not creeping me out, it's disgusting me. When I want to look for django reinhardt, I can look for "django music" or whatever, if I want the framework "django web framework" should do the trick. Oh, and and when I add a + before I word I want that word to show up, if there are no results with that word, show me no results. I'm fine with others having the option of personalized search, I'm not fine with me not hav…

Apparently it's not hard to turn off search personalization:

https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols/search

This will turn off all localization except language, location, and device type (mobile vs desktop).

Google doesn't have a way to turn off localization - obviously, it'll display different results for "football" in the US than in the rest of the world, and neither result is the "official" one.

If you need to change language, that's easy, it's just in search settings.

If you need to change location or device type, that's harder. You can either use Chrome's dev tools, or a tool like http://www.isearchfrom.com/

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#116

Post by 00N8 »

ape4 wrote: post #101
kibwen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun example of this: last week I was trying to figure out all the floating point operations that can produce NaN. Go ahead and try searching Google for "ways to make nan"; it's going to show you dozens of pages of naan recipes, and there isn't even a link to click to make it actually search for what you've typed (instead there's a link for Did you mean "ways to make naan"? , which shows a different set of naan recipe…

Its too bad it ignores the case of NaN (and other queries)

idk, but I think they employ multiple tokenizing strategies, including case insensitive, case sensitive,by words, by n-grams of letters...

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#117

Post by Kiro »

therein wrote: post #70
Kiro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can't since DDG is a wrapper for Bing.

I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#118

Post by throwawaylolx »

alopecoid wrote: post #105
throwawaylolx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google can and should customize search results based on location Should there not be an opt-out option though?

There is: Use something else. I don't mean this in a snippy way, but truly. If it's that bothersome, why not try something else? It seems that most people instead think that they have the privilege to change the product to their desires.

> why not try something else?

Because the "something else" lacks other features. Are you suggesting that users shouldn't have "the privilege" to suggest new features or discuss already existing features?

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#119

Post by SquareWheel »

iscro wrote: post #88
alopecoid wrote: post #5

Google can and should customize search results based on location, and it's not just about "local articles" as the article suggests. If enough people from the same general location click on certain results more frequently, then those results should rank higher for others who search from that same general location. We use Google because the results are useful, not because they are "unbiased". Ranking implies some sort…

People wanted and used google precisely because it was "unbiased" and "unlocalized". It's why it became so popular. The only reason for the biased localized results is due to corporate pressure from media and news industries. Also, you are conflating localized and unbiased results with spam and scam. Nobody is saying google shouldn't remove scams and spam. People are just saying they want unbiased results.

>People wanted and used google precisely because it was "unbiased" and "unlocalized". It's why it became so popular.

That's contrary to everything I know about Google's history, including the origins of Backrub and PageRank. Please provide citations in your comment.

Re: Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

#120

Post by mda »

Kiro wrote: post #117
therein wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using DDG primarily ever since Google tried to pull that login shenanigan on Chrome users. Switched to FF and DDG and with the occasional !g, I'm content. Try !b and tell me it's the same as DDG's results.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (for…

So its 95% bing/yahoo. I wish they were more transparent. But it does not sound nice when they say do not useevilgoogle instead use our slightly modified bing/yahoo wrapper.
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