People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it. • Hacker News Board

Re: People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it.

#31

Post by feylias » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:40 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #11

Fallacy alert: Just because people love Google search doesn't mean they love it because it is highly personalized. In the absence of better data, one could just as easily substitute "despite" for "because" in that sentence. The author's argument is analogous to saying that China's stance on civil rights is perfectly OK because everyone buys electronics made in China. I'm rarely logged into Google, and I send the DNT…

Yes. I looked through the comments on the article and the comments here waiting for someone to point out what the article should have addressed. That correlation isn't causation is so basic I'm still not sure I didn't maybe miss something in the main text.

Re: People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it.

#32

Post by herval » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 8:52 PM UTC

breckinloggins wrote: post #3

People don't hate personalized search, they hate not knowing what's going to happen with the information. Personally, I love how convenient it is for Google to know as much as it does about me. But I then have to begrudgingly trust that they "won't be evil" with that information. It's a tradeoff, and I like to think that most people understand it as such.

I don't think most people actually care about what's going to happen with information (not even personal details, with a big exception being their credit card number) at all...

Re: People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it.

#33

Post by zbuc » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 10:17 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

zbuc wrote: post #8

> First of all, that last sentence is in error. Google has been personalizing search since the summer of 2005. But isn't this article only referencing "personalizing search" in relation to Google Search+ Your World? What sorts of personalization existed in Google Search results before GSPYW?

Google has done several forms of personalization before "search plus your world": - Google detects your location (using GeoIP and similar) and personalizes results that way, both by redirecting you to google.$countrycode and by providing location-specific search (such as map results). You can't turn off the location-specific results, you can only make them more vague (by setting your location as a country rather than…

Yep, your last paragraph is what I've been feeling.

I've anecdotally seen much different results from Google since Google + Your World... searching for technical documentation has become gross -- the same queries for myself and coworkers will return different results.

But where is there to go? Duck Duck Go seems OK but I don't feel as comfortable using their UI as I do Google's. Probably just an issue of familiarity.