On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
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On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
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Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#2[deleted]
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#3I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.
http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney
Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.
Come on WSJ, you can do better.
edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches are:
1) Burundi 2) Guinea 3) Rwanda 4) Sierra Leone 5) United States
Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#4This 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 topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]
By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2]
[1] = http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&...
[2] = http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-compl...
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#5I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline. http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech. Come on WSJ, you can do better. edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know wh…
That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...
If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...
Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security, health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#6I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline. http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech. Come on WSJ, you can do better. edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know wh…
That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&... If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%... Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Rom…
I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#7This 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 knows.
Some of the more interesting things to me are:
--you can't reliably de-personalize (as you cited).
--the variation in results across our study was great.
--variation for signed out (even incognito) users was not much different from signed in users.
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#8"...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 a searchable term for longer. This just leads to the natural question: should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content? I don't think so, but I find myself arguing with a mathematical formula. The nature of the social value of making democratic decisions is different from the nature of the personal value of targeting results.
Weird.
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&... If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%... Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Rom…
I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.
Sorry for not being clear (was also trying to not be verbose!). All it shows is that all those terms were searched a lot less than Romney for the past 90 days, and yet they all were found to alter subsequent search results after searching them (unlike Romney).
Re: On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers
#10Here'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.