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by tytso 4925 days ago
I'm not convinced DuckDuckGo is such a great search engine. If I do a search for "Newtown", the first returned item was for the Newtown in New South Wales.

A search engine which knows that I live in the US and am interested in things in the US can more easily figure out that the Newtown that I'm interested in is the one in Connecticut in the United States.

Everyone tends to talk about the "filter bubble" as if it were always a bad thing, but editorial decisions are a good thing. To say that you always have to "teach the controversy" means that you fall into the trap that newspapers in the US have fallen into, where they feel obliged to give equal time to people who deny global warming, or people who try to argue that you need automatic weapons to hunt deer, or people who claimed that tobacco doesn't cause cancel, as people who have the backing of science behind them.

More positively, is the fact that newspapers to refuse to print stories about the moon landing being faked, evidence of the "media bubble"? If so give me more of it. I want more editorial filtering by the media, not less.

2 comments

The things you discuss, though, are things you would apply over the mass of people based on (ostensibly) observer-independent factors. That's not the sort of bubbling to which DDG and its ilk object, because it is not based on individualized preferences, nor is the data gathered by tracking people.

It could be argued that it's a sort of bubbling nonetheless, based on the preferences of some unspecified authority rather than each individual. But that's outside the scope of what DDG tries to address anyway.

Filtering based on location, language, and current time are all very logical. I have no problem with that. The 'bubble' problem is more about personal filtering. Who you are, what you do on the web.

But I object to your middle paragraph. Editorial decisions have nothing at all to do with bubbles. Bubbling is altering results based on the individual user, there is no connection to the results of mass media prioritization.

Basically, what you want isn't bubbling.