[hzay]

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again.

This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation of it. An unpersonalized search engine is much better than this thing that simply hides any interesting content from you in favor of showing you something related to your previous search or to whatever nonsense your neighbors look up. Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer.

I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.

[Zarel]

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle.

I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language.

Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested.

The idea of a filter bubble is definitely worth addressing, but I see no reason why getting more information music notes when I'm trying to search for information about C# is remotely beneficial. I can use Startpage or Incognito if I want to avoid filter bubbling, but for the vast majority of searches I do, relevance to me is useful.

But it's not best addressed through fear-mongering. Don't call it a child's imitation just because you don't understand how it could be useful.

[pdpi]

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information.

The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

[moultano]

Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

[ddnb]

I honestly doubt the use of certain words are going to limit your search results more than the way google is 'personalizing' search results by looking at your history/interests and basing it's results around that, do you have any sources for your claim?

[moultano]

If you know the language to use, you can get into that world yourself. For instance [did dinosaurs exist]. Only creationists talk about dinosaurs that way, and so you only get creationist content returned. People with a conventional view of natural history never put "dinosaur" and "exist" together.

Contrast that with [did dinosaurs live] which has a mix of creationist and normal results, despite meaning the same thing.

[pdpi]

Maybe. The naive approach definitely has a strong filtering effect, but there's more than one non-naive approach, though. Some of those are narrowing, and others are widening. Google seems to prefer the narrowing ones.

[tallanvor]

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested.

But this is part of the problem, isn't it? You might not get the anti-vax information, but others will see that instead of REAL information.

And, be honest with yourself. Some of what you do want to see would be considered clickbait by others, it's just that Google already knows you well enough to show you things that fit your own world view.

[speedplane]

The vast majority of Google results I see are very poor quality articles optimized for Google. Wikipedia is almost always the best option. Either the algorithm they are using seems to be optimizing for the wrong thing, or marketers have gotten really good at playing the game.

[indigochill]

I spent a few years in the marketing world, doing copywriting optimized for search engines among other things. Good marketers are like professional gamers in that every time Google "changes the meta" they're uncannily quick to find new ways to game the system.

[zerd]

But personalization can also work against you. If for instance Google wants to favour one political candidate over another they could "personalize" your search results by boosting positive sentiment articles and filter out those with negative sentiment towards that candidate. And since Google search is still viewed as fairly objective it could have massive impact, and since it's personalized it's very hard to detect.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/googles-search-algorithm-steal...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-39938599

[ranit]

off-topic ... or is it?

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information.

Health information should not be considered political stuff. Unfortunately, it is ... at least in some countries.

[sillysaurus3]

It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise.

You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is.

Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't.

You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is that "If I search for something in Seattle, it would be stupid to return results in Chicago"? Probably not.

My webdev friend was excited that her personal site was being returned in her search results whenever someone searched a project she had worked on. I suggested that google was serving her personalized results. She searched in incognito. Her site was still being returned. Pretty good, right? She was getting exposure.

When we used a VPN, she was not in the results. Google knew that our searches came from our IP address, and that searches from our IP should include her site, since she mostly visited her site from our IP. Or something along those lines. Either way, it was a misleading worldview.

I'm going to be harsh for a second, but I mean this lovingly: Stop being naive. It's important for us to be skeptical of Google. They're the thousand-pound gorilla, and the moment they do more than wink and nod at their "Don't be evil" philosophy then we should start getting scared.

[jdietrich]

As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant. You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross.

How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?

Google process literally trillions of searches per year, with each search taking a few milliseconds. You're asking them to make a complex tradeoff between providing completely irrelevant results for some queries and excessively personalised results for others. I don't disagree that they could probably do a better job of making that tradeoff, but I don't think that they're being malicious or negligent either. I think that they're making perfectly reasonable engineering decisions given the constraints of scale.

I don't think I am being naive. I don't blindly trust Google. I think that there are many important questions to be asked about how major internet companies collect, store and process our personal data. I think that America urgently needs to pass legislation equivalent to our General Data Protection Regulation. I think that there are significant concerns about the quality of information that people see online, but I think that publishers play a far greater role than Google in this respect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

[another-dave]

There's definitely a scale I think — showing me local pizza places is great. What about guessing my budget & ruling out places it thinks I won't book? That's getting into a grey area & personally I'd find that uncomfortable/undesirable.

What about applying it to non-transactional stuff like news? Should it personalise results based on what it thinks I like?

Again with subjective/objective distinction — I know my friend will tailor movie recommendations to me based on mutual interests / past discussions.

I expect though that a library catalogue would point me to the same info on global warming no matter who I am.

The trouble at the moment is that Google is conflating these two types of interaction & the user doesn't know which of their queries are personalised (and to what extent / based on what criteria).

> How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?

In my opinion, this is the crux of it — are we happy with algorithms filling this blank unfettered, based on their own learning. If not, it's something that we have to discuss and agree on, and then enforce / bring visibility to.

At present, Google aren't negligent (legally anyway, as we haven't set any bar) and may not be acting maliciously. But if we think change is necessary (at least for visibility of what's happening under the hood), we need to ask the questions around these services to drive that change

[nerdponx]

What bothers me is the attempt at omniscience. Give me an option! Let me have a checkbox for "tailor results to my location". Heck, turn it on by default. Just give me the damn choice.

[psyc]

Sometimes you just want the top results by PageRank, like in 1998 when Google was miraculous. I don't know how to get that anymore. I want information from out in the world - I generally don't want the contents of my own head reflected back at me.

[dgacmu]

Search, then click on the "tools" button and toggle to "Verbatim." It's a little more than just unpersonalized -- it also gets rid of things like synonym expansion, stemming, and allowing the search results to elide particular parts of your query. But it definitely gives you that 1998 feeling. :)

https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...

[musage]

> As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant.

My takeaway is that the whole thread of the first comment should be collapsed, which is usual for HN. Important topics get ignored or derailed.

[sillysaurus3]

pg once joked that Google's philosophy on search is the same as Scientology: What's true is true for you.

In our case, I just think it's interesting that my webdev friend was trying to ascertain truth about the world -- "is she associated with the project she worked on?" -- and the answer came up "yes!" for her even though it was "Nope" for the rest of the world.

Sure, it's an interesting question of which tradeoffs they should make. But as users, it's not really our responsibility to be concerned about that. All we know is that Google is acting a bit strangely.

To be clear, if Google stayed how it currently is, I'd have no problem at all. I'm just worried that google can go from strange to malicious at the flip of a switch. It's unsettling that they're the only realistic option. DDG has been picking up steam, but hopefully they'll do more than nip at Google's heels.

[marcosdumay]

> To be clear, if Google stayed how it currently is, I'd have no problem at all. I'm just worried that google can go from strange to malicious at the flip of a switch.

What evidence do you even have that they didn't go malicious? And how could you gather such evidence if you don't have any?

[Tyr42]

>Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't.

>>I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered.

Some people are saying that restaurants shouldn't be personalized.

[scaryclam]

This was actually a problem for me recently. I just wanted to know the options for restaurants in an area of London. I didn't want results specific to me, I wanted all of the restaurants. I ended up not using Google since it just wouldn't give me the simple information I was looking for. Googles becoming less and less useful as time goes on, which is a real shame as they were excellent 10 years ago.

[michaelbuckbee]

The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language.

I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc.

Similarly, having some basics about your geographic location, spoken language, etc. would seem to be quite helpful. If only to help separate out things like that there are 8000+ "Park Street" in the US when I type in an address and Google gives me the one closest to my location.

[orclev]

That's at least partially the fault of that particular language getting cute with their naming and not considering the impact that has a on trying to disambiguate things without having to introduce further context. Ruby isn't the only one who commits that particular sin (looking at you Chef). Java arguably commits the same sin with regard to the core language, but considering how rarely "java" is used on its own in reference to the coffee based beverage that's fairly harmless. Moral of the story, stop getting cute with the names of your stuff and naming a bunch of different tools/concepts/frameworks with ambiguous names. If you must do so at least use some clever portmanteaus and don't just straight up steal other words that already have specific completely unrelated meanings.

grumble grumble chef knife, chef cookbook, chef recipe, chef cucumber incoherent mumbling

[cyphunk]

you imply that when someone that is not a programmer, and say works in the rare stones industry, goes to google to search for ruby gems, that they are not shown a bunch of programmer garbage?

[pawelk]

Personalized disambiguation can be really handy. I'm a hobby woodworker, I've recently bought a vintage Record #4 hand plane and wanted to learn more about it. I found out this model was manufactured in 1939-1945.

So without thinking I type record plane 1939-1945 into Google. And guess what? I get information about hand planes, pictures of hand planes in the images section, links to ebay auctions for vintage planes etc, and in between these there were only a few results related to aircraft combat during WWII.

The same query in incognito mode doesn't return even a single link related to hand tools.

[michaelbuckbee]

I'm implying that Google "learns" over time that I'm more interested in ruby the programming language and that a jeweler would over time get more gemstone related resources.

[piker]

> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer.

For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.

[chx]

Lenovo has a policy of cancelling orders if the billing and shipping address country does not match. Fine. So they know I am Canadian because otherwise I couldn't make an order. Right? You can't get to the chat when travelling because it's geofenced based on your IP instead of order number / serial number of the laptop.

[lentil_soup]

Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked.

Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!

[Daycrawler]

No need to be asked. The browser sends the Accept-Language header depending on the language set in the browser's settings, which defaults to the OS language for the browser installed by default (other browsers will ask at installation).

In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.

[marcosdumay]

Asking is more reliable. There is no reason for a site to believe it should translate stuff for me just because my browser's interface is in another language.

Do use the header, but always be open for the user changing the language too.

[beojan]

Amazon is particularly irritating for this. If you use, for instance, amazon.fr, the UI is only available in French, even though it's mostly a translation of the English UI on amazon.com.

[PeterisP]

For practical usage e.g. finding information on technical topics (where reliably getting relevant results quickly is important, and randomly finding/exploring new "interesting" content is not), the google's personalization is immensely valuable to me; it gives me a source telling what I want on the first try, but the more-privacy-less-personalization alternatives can find the same thing only if I fine-tune the query multiple times.

Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.

[hobofan]

> Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do.

It's also very useful for learning new things.

Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless.

I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability.

[marksellers]

I find curated lists better for exploration than search, but perhaps I just lost my ability to search whimsically. To each their own I guess.

[Bartweiss]

Robin Sloan did a great bit of fiction about what truly superb Google personalization would look like. No search bar, no results list, just the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You click it, and then the relevant thing happens.

I think about that every time I go off to incognito to make Google stop hobbling my results and give me the thing I was actually trying to find.

[endorphone]

How does this sophistry get a pass? Google's search is dominant because it provides the most meaningful, useful results to most people. If you think this is chairs to the moon or a child's imitation, surely there is a market for you to exploit. Otherwise your argument sounds ridiculous, with sentences that together become ridiculously meaningless beyond smearing Google.

[hzay]

> surely there is a market for you to exploit

Yes I do believe it's up for grabs.

[oblio]

I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.

[amelius]

> It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him.

Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1]

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...

[dhimes]

hopefully typing

    &pws=0

at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.

[gooseus]

This is what I was hoping to find... of course knowing how to do that is completely esoteric. I don't know why they couldn't just put another button next to I'm Feeling Lucky that says "Pretend you don't know me".

My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it".

Why wouldn't they put a button like that? At what point did optionality and customization of your user experience become undesirable to the point that you need to obfuscate or prevent it?

My guess is that too many people read Don't Make Me Think as dogma and now we're in a world where the tech industry assumes they need to do all the thinking for anyone that touches their product and the users brought up in this world have no idea what it's like to not have their UX dictated to them.

[UncleMeat]

Because it is another premier feature to maintain. Because more buttons mean more people accidentally hit the wrong button and then complain about shitty search results.

[gooseus]

A button that appends that querystring parameter to your search query is a "premier feature" that a multi-billion dollar company is hesitant to maintain?

They already have a button that would cause far more confusion if accidentally pressed (Feeling Lucky) since it results in a page that isn't a set of google search results.

Sorry, gotta say that those are pretty weak counterpoints... I expected something about how Google's business interest has everything to do with personalized search and each non-personalized search would result in less revenue, or something like that.

[dhimes]

I'm with you. I think they don't want that feature used, and having to explain it to the common user is frightening. This is one of the few things on my whiteboard that never gets erased.

I can't guarantee it still works, either.

[CiPHPerCoder]

> I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.

And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge.

Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it.

That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.

[ryacko]

I wish Google would have a clippy-style avatar so that when I put in takeaway pizza, it will tap my screen and ask, "did you mean 'takeaway pizza chicago'?"

[nilved]

This makes so much more sense. People are so lazy to type in their location that Google had to spend millions/billions of dollars on technology to stalk you and figure it out for you? I don't buy it.

[Ice_cream_suit]

Using Baidu and Yandex for searches is instructive.