[carbocation]

This 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...

[epi0Bauqu]

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.

[carbocation]

It would be vaguely interesting to know from study participants how unique their browser is.[1] Mine appeared to yield the same result whether in incognito mode or not, but I can't really see Google using this approach.

Your point about Google trends is counterintuitive but evidence-supported, which makes it particularly interesting. It may well be that they are looking at outcome measures after search personalization, and abandoning personalizations that yield no results. Or perhaps a certain volume is required over time for a particular query before triggering an automated personalization trial. As you say, it's a black box, so who knows.

[1] = https://panopticlick.eff.org/