Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

spreadprivacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 131 posts

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

#121

Post by thecleaner »

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…

The arguments for personalisation make sense. But the other story is sometimes we need unbiased results. Like when reading about politics. You need the dose of "whats are the facts" rather than "What are the facts for me"

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

#122

Post by dhimes »

rayvy wrote: post #92
kiriakasis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode. I now use duckduckgo as default search engine and my experience is mixed. The problem with google is that sometime you search for something new and then you see the bubble very clearly, which applies non only to search but also to youtube (maybe even more). The problem with duckduckgo is that you are searching…

> 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…

I use ddg as my primary, and one thing it's brilliant at is Mozilla Dev Network. I append my question with mdn (not !mdn- the bang uses mozilla's search and it's not as good) and I usually get my answer at the top. DDG is so reliable now that when I occasionally do have trouble in, say, a non-mdn related search) I fool around a while before I remember that I can try google.

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

#123

Post by dhimes »

noxToken wrote: post #64
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…

Although the tailored results have been useful, I think I still like the days back when you needed search operators. I was once looking up stuff about electrons (the particle). A plain query of electron only returned results for the framework on my first page. Understandable. The other annoyance is the lack of Wikipedia results. For a general topic, I like to have a few pages to chooses from about the topic in additi…

Interesting. Wikipedia what my top result when I DDG'd "floating point operations that produce NaN"

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

#124

Post by dhimes »

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

wow I didn't know that

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

#125

Post by Kye »

thecleaner wrote: post #121
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…

The arguments for personalisation make sense. But the other story is sometimes we need unbiased results. Like when reading about politics. You need the dose of "whats are the facts" rather than "What are the facts for me"

Replacing an algorithm that bombards people with propaganda with unfiltered propaganda doesn't seem like an improvement. Someone who, for example, mistakes a map of policing for a map of crime won't do well in either scenario.

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

#126

Post by specialist »

scarejunba wrote: post #38

The filter bubble is the best thing ever. I use search engines to find things and Google finds them for me. I want it to be super tailored to me and show reputable results. I remember 2000s era search and looking at Page 2. Now I don't scroll below result five 99% of the time. Thank you, Google. I have to say, though. US Google is better than any other Google I've used.

Agreed.

The problem is the term "filter bubble" conflates personalization, relevance, and recommendations.

I can do without the recommendation engines.

Source: Worked on a recommenders for mid-sized e-commerce site.

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

#127

Post by Drdrdrq »

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

Ha, what do you know... :D I actually always use startpage.com, but since they are using Google, I assumed they passed this query to it. What is interesting is that this trick still works on startpage.com while it doesn't on google... I must say I'm even less impressed by Google search than I was before. It's getting worse and worse.

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

#128

Post by bduerst »

amelius wrote: post #73
bduerst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would allow some pretty rampant gaming of SEO, wouldn't it?

If Google shows "these results were filtered using the fact that you're a Caucasian, in the age-group 30-35, with a predicted income of $50.000", then how is that going to help SEO much?

Search keywords are a commodity. Allowing anyone to peek under the hood is going to lead to bad actors mass scraping and gaming, even if the search result signals you're sharing are aggregated.

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

#129

Post by therein »

mda wrote: post #120
Kiro wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it against the ToS of Google to perform search on someone's behalf and relay them the results?

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

#130

Post by malloryerik »

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…

Better than having to go to Privacy Mode (which can feel a little creepy with the spy icon and even just the name), it would be easy for Google to make a clear On/Off toggle for personalized vs raw results.

For the sake of education and not being evil (or "doing the right thing"), it would be nice to be able to view results from other typical profiles' points of view.

Post reply on HN