251–260 of 278 posts
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Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.
A UX lesson I learned long ago: If you have to have an option for it then it's a poor design
But don't become complacent and let these transform into actual beliefs. There is no quicker way to kill your creativity.
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Did you actually read it? The part I copied here for your viewing convenience is not "speculation" nor "hyperbole" or "opinion", it discusses the best example given so far by Googlers about the benefits of SPYW: that when you know someone who wrote a book about something, and you search about that something, then posts by this person, relevant to your search, pop up! And this is the best case scenario.
Did you actually read it?" Yes, I clicked the provided link and read the entire article from start to finish. First, I want to say that I hope my first post did not sound like a personal attack on you. I was only trying to present my view of the article that you linked to. Next, I would like to try and back up the comments that I made about the article to hopefully make it a little more clear why I said that. I refer…
You're quite convincing about the "hyperbole" part, but I'd argue this is par for the course for journalists: they have to exaggerate a bit.
But where I completely disagree with you is when you say:
> Then he says "If you don’t follow Lee and you do the same search, you won’t get that post." Again, that's the idea of the personalized search option..... and again, it is an option that can be turned off if you don't think it's useful.
The post he's talking about is the most relevant result for that search. If Google only shows it to people who follow the author of the post, then they will have broken search in favor of some kind of "social" thing that is much worse than what we had before.
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Google's an AI company. If they are guessing wrong, then they're doing poorly as a company and will suffer financially. They have every incentive to make sure it guesses wrong as infrequently as possible. You have many interests, but a finite number, they can all play a role in the model of you. Similarly with people you know. Now, if you're suggesting that for some reason there's an inherent "you will never be able…
> You have many interests, but a finite number I'm not even one person. We have many computers in our home; I'm logged in to all of them, Google-wise, but they are used by my wife, the woman who looks after our kids, our children themselves, etc. It would be very impractical to have each person log in as herself before they can search anything on Google (and my kids are too young to even be allowed to have a Google a…
They do - for selected queries where it makes sense.
Try searching for "jaguar" (no quotes). On the right, I have "Searches related to jaguar", which include "jaguar big cat" "jaguar car" and "jaguar download"
If I was working at a company and my boss would use such "STFU"-style statements, I would consider quitting sooner rather than later.
And here is why: I remember in my old company, the time when our boss started using similar rhetorics it did not take long for the whole thing to go down the drain because he would continue clinging to bad major decisions for dear life, against all the resistance and warnings of practically all his employees and those "STFU" phrases were, I guess, his way of coping by closing his eyes to the inevitable wall we were speeding towards. Like a reality-distortion field kicked into overdrive gone haywire.
Seeing Larry use such a phrase at the SPYW-launch staff event makes you wonder just how much internal disagreement there really was amongst google's employees.
Not a good signs at all, if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…
If it was really all about the users and their experiences, then why is there no way to opt-out 100%?
And the last time GOOG did what AAPL just did yesterday... must have been, hmm, never.
Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…
No, it's not. When I search for something, I want the most relevant results, not what you think are most relevant to me. I'm a liberal, and I tend to visit more liberal sites for political information - Crooks and Liars, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, etc. for general news. I'm also more likely to share links to those sites. But if I'm searching for information that could be considered related to a political issue, I don't want Google deciding that the most relevant results will only come from left leaning sites when a conservative site may have better information about a specific issue.
I believe someone even gave a TED talk about this issue.
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...three weeks before your birthday, your girlfriend - frantically searching for a Python book to surprise you with, wades through hundreds of results pertaining to snakes, eventually gives up in exasperation and decides to head to the nearest Borders and... Oh wait. I see your point in the post above but disagree. People should control their search results based on what they are searching for, relevance is objective…
And during her frantic searching, his girlfriend won't try something as simple as "python programming book"? I find that hard to believe, especially if her default association for "python" is the snake.
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I'm almost certain she would use a more sensible search term. In fact: she'd most likely have the title already, having picked the brains of a friend or colleague. You seem to have missed the point of my (admittedly flimsy) example though. What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at…
> What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at all. > Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.' And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simpli…
Links in Hebrew (I'm in Israel) are unreadable and not helping.
I constantly end up with German results polluting my search (maybe because I signed up when I lived in Germany? No idea, it's out of my control). It is a hassle to fight them.
It got never better. I gradually noticed a trend of decreasing usefulness of Google search, without any visible sign of getting better. Only more dumbed down. And now 'social'?
Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…
And I call BS. Nobody asked for results to be more relevant by going THAT particular way.
On the contrary, people have asked for more relevant results by eliminating this kind of artificial results.
I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience.
Really? Because it looks like it's all about competing with Facebook and improving the bottom line.
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"just show me the most relevant links" Here's the rub - for a given query there is no such thing as the list of link that are "most relevant". Different people will have (potentially widely) divergent opinions on what the most relevant set of links are for the exact same query . The goal Google web-search [1] is to show you the links from the whole web that are most relevant to you . Knowing more about you allows a s…
> The goal Google web-search [1] is to show you the links from the whole web that are most relevant to you. But my point is: there is no such thing as "me". Now I do this (programming) and an hour later I do that (cooking). Then my daughter comes along and she wants to see pictures of puppies -- but I personally could not care less about puppies. If Google thinks I'm into puppies and tries to infer something from tha…
False problem. For one, your daughter can (and eventually will) either get her own Google account, or she will get her own computer.
But most importantly: ok, so you're not just "you", but your whole family uses the computer.
You still, as a person, get better results by Google using its knowledge of your family search habits --which include yours--, than just blindly guessing.