6 ms·

Paul Graham, the Commons, and How Google Stopped Being Google

139 points by maxprogram 15y ago

willvarfar 15y ago
Its called "the filter bubble" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
brudgers 15y ago
>"They make changes to the user interface and collect more data, analyzing what they've got to see what users "liked" more." I find this so utterly naive that I am incredulous. Google is a business. They don't tweek results based in favor of user preferences. They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in. It's not an accident that [in the US] http://www.google.com/search?q=weather http://www.google.com/search?q=weather provides top links to commercial advertizing driven sites for one's local weather and only portals into the main page of weather.gov rather than the local forecast page. Google search results aren't the best possible for the most people. They are the worst tolerable for maximizing revenue. [edit] do employees have to use 20% time for downvoting on HN or is it part of their job?
- bambax 15y ago
  Either you didn't read the article or you didn't understand it. The author doesn't complain that Google search results aren't "the best possible for the most people"--au contraire! He complains they're not the same, that if you search from a given location or being in a given demographic you will get different results than other people, and that this fact erodes the trust users have in Google: how do I know if this set of results is the absolute best on a given topic or if Google is simply showing to me what it "thinks" I will like?
  - brudgers 15y ago
    It isn't showing you what it thinks you will like at all. It is showing you the most amount of pertinent advertising that it thinks you will tolerate while promoting sites containing similar advertising as high up the page rank as it thinks you will tolerate. All those links to your G+ friends are promoted to keep you on Google's properties where they can make the most money when you click on an advertising link - think of Google like a DisneyWorld's Magic Kingdom and G+ like Downtown Disney.
- moultano 15y ago
  "They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in." This is entirely false, and I wish misinformed people would stop parroting it. There's an extremely rigid firewall between the ad side of the company and the search side. People working on search don't even see metrics on how their changes effect ads, let alone make decisions based on them. When I want change the way ranking works, there's a big stack of statistics I have to collect. None of them involve ads. All of them involve how useful the results are to a user.
  - brudgers 15y ago
    I'll believe it when someone can explain why a search for "weather" returns the results it does. The Weather channel utilizes Google search. The Weather Underground...well name a Google service they could use and don't. Accuweather provides plausible deniablity. On the other hand, weather.gov employs some of the best meteorologists anywhere, provides the official hazardous weather warnings the other sites rely on, and has a wonderfully informative hourly weather graph for any given location. In other words, Google doesn't provide the most relevant results first when it comes to local weather in the US, it provides the most profitable. But I'm willing to read your statistical explanation for why this is so. Go ahead and make your case. Be sure to explain how the special format for the weather page is based on statistical data and not hard coded.
    - moultano 15y ago
      I get weather.gov at #3 after weather.com, and sfgate.com/weather (probably because I'm in the bay area.) Where does it rank for you? I can't get into detail explaining what goes into our rankings to you. I can tell you that I can bring up a debug view that shows all the signals that enter in to this ranking, and none of them involve "uses google products." We love for people to complain about queries. That feedback is very useful, and we always need more of it. But when our search results suck, the reason is that our system is too stupid, not that it's perversely smart at funneling you into money making opportunities.
      - brudgers 15y ago
bambax 15y ago
The author is prompt to admit that this is pure speculation on his part, and so we don't know how and why Google became what it is; but I find his explanation very convincing. Serving personalized results to users may increase click-through rates but it degrades the idea we form of what Google is and what it does.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  > Serving personalized results to users may increase click-through rates but it degrades the idea we form of what Google is and what it does. If it serves me better results, then how so?
  - yew 15y ago
    Better can mean 'more liked' and 'more accurate' which are not necessarily equivalent. Accuracy being something of a fuzzy category, of course.
  - falling 15y ago
    Here’s how: http://dontbubble.us http://dontbubble.us I always thought that search personalization was of course better, until that page made me think about the downsides.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    Who says it serves you better results? If I type in "tea", am I searching for Tealuxe in Harvard Square or am I searching for the botanical and scientific material on a common drink or am I searching for recipes? The new "social+local" Google biases my results towards the former. A search engine used to be a tool for reaching out into the world and finding something new. Now it searches through what I already know? What's the point in that?
    - mayanksinghal 15y ago
      Search engines were never a content discovery tool for me. I use HN, Twitter, Facebook for that. Some others use Digg, Pinterest and Reddit. When I search on a search engine, I am looking for a solution to a question that I have.
disgruntledphd2 15y ago
This is a really good article. Succint, reasonably well written and interesting. That being said, one imagines that Google (despite being an advertising company) have a huge investment in the quality of search. However, because they are essentially a monopoly, many people try to game the system for their benefit. This creates an arms-race, and may be one of the root causes of this personalisation. I do agree with the main point, that this could potentially make Google less useful for us all as a whole, and will probably lead to their disruption, sooner or later.
robrenaud 15y ago
> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine. What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer. If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv. Did it pull the one from your state? Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the state the generates the most Google searches for dmv, but the California DMV is likely relevant iff you are in California. This idea of one best search page for one query, independent of any other factors based on the user or users geography is really overly romantic and simplicistic. On the other hand, the filter bubble stuff is a nice narrative, but it mostly makes for an interesting story rather than real problem. Having worked on search personalization at Google about 5 years ago, it's just hard to make that big impact on search results with personalization. "dmv" is a nice example where it's works brilliantly, but those ambiguous queries are pretty rare, and hence the more bread and butter stuff is still really driving most of the quality.
- drhayes9 15y ago
  A little off-topic, but... Why is this getting down-voted? Is it because you disagree with what this person is saying? I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation. It feels like this is getting down-voted because people don't like that Google is doing these things. So, this person is getting down-voted 'cuz of Google? Huh?
  - joering2 15y ago
    > I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation. yeah, well.. you need to see my posts on Apple threads.
  - lkrubner 15y ago
    Sadly, Paul Graham has endorsed the idea of using the downvote to express disagreement. I personally dislike this use of the downvote, but it does have official sanction. Read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
stephengoodwin 15y ago
I agree Google has gone into a filter bubble, but the article very speculative and provides no statistics or examples to make a good point. This is a pop-science article, so I don't have high expectations.
- moultano 15y ago
  Why do you agree then that Google has gone into a filter bubble?
  - stephengoodwin 15y ago
    Based on various other articles I've read. I would not go to an extreme and say "this is a terrible idea," but I would assert it's worthy of serious thought on how to ensure we are not limiting ourselves to the filter we've built. Nonetheless, my criticism was directed at this article for not providing at least a few examples of the results of a filter bubble.
skmurphy 15y ago
Alexis Madrigal reaches a subtle and thought provoking conclusion "The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make." This would seem to be at odds with a lot of "Big Data" evangelism but I think he is right.
stfu 15y ago
What I find fascinating is that with the sheer unlimited amount of data they have the quality of their search engine results have been stagnating for almost 10 years and no substantial break through been seen so far. The only somewhat "break through" could be seen in local searches - and saving people from adding their zip code, city or street name to their search phrase seems to be not that much impressive either.
davemel37 15y ago
this is really interesting. What People WANT and what they THINK they want are two different things...How people define and Perceive SEARCH and how they use search are two different things. I think Google is facing a SELF-DEFEATING reality that as they serve people with better results, they erode the perception of their brand in peoples eyes. There is clearly an incongruity between what people "THINK" they want from a search engine( and how they perceive Google) versus, what they "REALLY WANT" from a search engine. Conflicting priorities are always a struggle, but this is an especially interesting one. One side has a DATA supported reality that can't be disputed about what searchers want and what puts bread on the table. On the other side is the more important, but less quantifiable reality that their BRAND is what brings searches back to the site, not the quality of the results, but the perception of GOOGLE and SEARCH being synonymous. This brand value is clearly getting diluted by delivering better results, and could in the long run be their demise.
- davemel37 15y ago
  I almost wonder if SEARCH by definition can't and shouldn't be the end answer, but rather the journey to discovering new things and finding answers. Google is assuming that when people search, they want answers, but maybe what they really want is to SEARCH for answers.
- darklajid 15y ago
  The problem with the approach Google is taking, the reason why I 'left': I felt that it became harder and harder to actually get what I want (using your caps: WANT). I know it. No, you don't know better. No, I didn't misspell that, no geolocation is a bad idea for results or - worse - language. It's a mediocre service now. Became big with search, became worthless for searches for me. I cannot search anymore, I can play games with software that tries to second guess my intentions.
- modeless 15y ago
  This is more insightful than the article. The problem isn't optimizing for the "community" as the article seems to think. The problem really is that what people think they want and what they actually want are opposed. Facebook faces the same problem. I think the unfortunate endgame here is legislation that will require what people think they want (e.g. privacy, absolute control) at the expense of some things they actually want (e.g. frictionless social interaction, simplicity). (To forestall some argument: Yes, I realize that privacy/social interaction and control/simplicity are not always mutually exclusive. However, there are cases where they interfere with each other, which requires compromise.)
yanw 15y ago
At first search signals were mainly provided by the content itself and now signals from the user are being incorporated. There is already an established term for this and it’s not “filter bubble” or “tailoring” the term is “relevance” and it’s the core of search. If the author is suggesting that data about a user’s identity, history, and location isn't usefully to providing her with the best possible results then he should stick to writing about stuff he actually comprehends and not be the umpteenth author resorting to use “Google” in the title to whore traffic.
PaulMcCartney 15y ago
It's nice to romanticize what Google might've once been, but at the end of the day Google is a tool that provides a service. To have a qualm regarding the current user experience is a different story, but in terms of the delivery of sought after content I don't think one could argue they have taken steps anywhere but forwards.
laconian 15y ago
This article is custom tailored for the HN echo chamber. The link to PG for this article is tenuous at best.
qeorge 15y ago
It reminds me of HN itself. I don't want to know what the "average" likes to read, or even what people like me like to read. I want to know what smart, interesting people (not me!) like to read. In other words: I want curation by an expert, not the average of everyone's inputs. Google is supposed to know the right answer, not ask all my friends what the answer is and report back.
- gxs 15y ago
  I completely agree with you on this topic. In a similar vein, I don't want to read the average Joe's take on why he loves the iPad 3 so much (I usually abstain from commenting, though lately I've said what the hey) - I want to hear what smart, more enlightened people have to say. That was the real value of HN for me when I first got on years ago. It was hearing from people like patio11 when the topic of SEO came up. The thread recently where Jordan Mendelson (napster hacker) chimed regarding Napster's back end is the quintessential example of what I'm talking about.
nextstep 15y ago
Does anyone know an easy way to prevent Google from tailoring my search results based off my location? I don't want to use a proxy, because then the results would just be tailored to that (false) location.
- EventHorizon 15y ago
  More Search Tools : Verbatim?
- mtrimpe 15y ago
  I know pws=0 works for turning off personalized search.
chanderson0 15y ago
The "personalization" of the web is not a Google-specific phenomenon. I am, at this very moment, sitting in a session at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit where a marketer from Toyota is espousing personalizing site content to users. This practice is being pushed _hard_ to all businesses here as a central theme of growth of the internet. In the sense that this drives better business, it certainly will be. Don't expect to go to Toyota.com and see the same experience as your neighbor anymore.
gfaremil 15y ago
Discovery and personalization are not compatible with each other. So if you use Google search as a discovery tool, then personalization hurts. There is no alternative. Maybe DDG but results are not so good.
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
I feel like there's a recent anti-Google sentiment among the hacker/techie community which seems very unsubstantiated by solid reasoning or logic. The argument in particular, that search quality is getting worse, is a little lost on me because, for me or anyone I talk to at least, this is simply not true. In fact, I find myself spending less and less time on "Google the Search Engine" because it's gotten so damn good at giving me the right result right away based on the simplest and vaguest keywords (I use the omnibar so I don't even go to google.com anymore). I still remember not so long ago having to try different phrasings of my search keywords a number of times before I would get the result I was looking for on the main page (or in cases of extreme frustration clicking through pages and pages of search results). This is largely not the case anymore. From my general interactions with people and how they use the web, anecdotal as it may be, they simply doesn't give a shit about ads, filter bubbles and so on. Google Search hasn't changed for them in any meaningful way except that it's gotten a lot better at figuring out what they wanted to find (and in most cases they are not even conscious of that improvement over time). With regards to other other free G-services (Gmail, Docs, G+, Blogger, YouTube), if you are consciously buying into them, it is implied that you know you are entering into a relationship where parts of the real-estate you're interacting with might be used to display ads and I think everyone understands and accepts that. I am an avid conspiracy theorist, however, and have more long-term concerns about what happens if Google turns TRULY evil and starts to use its data to spy on citizens on behalf of some authoritarian government. But as of right now I feel a little foolish reacting to this concern in any significant way.
- bartwe 15y ago
  For me the feeling of reduced quality is that when i don't find the answer on the first page, that i have less luck with additional keywords and more pages then i think i used to have. These queries are mostly trying to cast a wide net with some errorcodes or stacktraces and seeing if others reported similar problems.
- JBiserkov 15y ago
  I personally have to modes: 1. I already know what I'm looking for: a particular website, post, comment, the lyrics of a song that I know a part of. 2. I have a question, I don't know the answer, but I'll recognize it when I see it. In my experience Google is getting better at type 1 '(re)discovery/popularity' search and worse at type 2 'exploratory/specificity' search. Depending on the ratio of type 1 vs type 2 in your search habits, Google results will get better/worse for you. They introduced Verbatim search to solve the specifity problem, but in my experience it hardly ever works :(
toddnessa 15y ago
The article points out reasons as to why many of us are leaving Google for other search engines that protect our private data by not recording our search information. Startpage for instance does not track your private data. You will not have your IP address recorded or have tracking cookies put on your computer. I know we now live in a world where it is difficult to get away from Google altogether. It seems like they want to collect data on everybody in various ways. However, many of us are beginning to try. My gmail account may be the next to go.
6ren 15y ago
The Dr. Frankenstein in me loves the idea of an automated data-driven business: generic algorithm + A-B testing + payment mechanism. If you could also automate litigation... running many in parallel, a useful monster might one day emerge. Evolution has worked well elsewhere. The real problem is an exponential search space, and time/experiments needed to explore it. The problem of giving people what they want is also the problem of markets and democracy in general. Fortunately for us buyers/citizens, we usually eventually realize what we really want - unfortunately for the vendor/politician catering to what we previously thought we wanted. There's an appeal to Jobs' approach: make what they will want once they've see it. Far superior to creating/governing by numbers.
jroseattle 15y ago
With the "old" Google, a search made me feel as though I'd stepped into the potential realm of answers to my query. The most relevant, to me, was the stuff that mapped to my query the best -- nothing more, but nothing less. Now, I feel like I'm living in the law of averages. I'm not interested in the average; I want the top of the scale. I really do not want social and local and all the other unknown contexts involved in giving me what's right "for me". With all the contextual crap, I feel like now I get the "less". I wish they let me have the option of turning it all off, and just going with content-based search. Of course, they have to filter out the crap that's being generated to game their search index, but outside of that -- give me what the web has.
- amorphid 15y ago
  You can get the unpersonalized version when needed. Simply log out of your Google account. Yoi can use a different browser, too.

139 points by maxprogram 15y ago

Its called "the filter bubble" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

>"They make changes to the user interface and collect more data, analyzing what they've got to see what users "liked" more." I find this so utterly naive that I am incredulous. Google is a business. They don't tweek results based in favor of user preferences. They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in. It's not an accident that [in the US] http://www.google.com/search?q=weather http://www.google.com/search?q=weather provides top links to commercial advertizing driven sites for one's local weather and only portals into the main page of weather.gov rather than the local forecast page. Google search results aren't the best possible for the most people. They are the worst tolerable for maximizing revenue. [edit] do employees have to use 20% time for downvoting on HN or is it part of their job?

bambax 15y ago
Either you didn't read the article or you didn't understand it. The author doesn't complain that Google search results aren't "the best possible for the most people"--au contraire! He complains they're not the same, that if you search from a given location or being in a given demographic you will get different results than other people, and that this fact erodes the trust users have in Google: how do I know if this set of results is the absolute best on a given topic or if Google is simply showing to me what it "thinks" I will like?
- brudgers 15y ago
  It isn't showing you what it thinks you will like at all. It is showing you the most amount of pertinent advertising that it thinks you will tolerate while promoting sites containing similar advertising as high up the page rank as it thinks you will tolerate. All those links to your G+ friends are promoted to keep you on Google's properties where they can make the most money when you click on an advertising link - think of Google like a DisneyWorld's Magic Kingdom and G+ like Downtown Disney.
moultano 15y ago
"They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in." This is entirely false, and I wish misinformed people would stop parroting it. There's an extremely rigid firewall between the ad side of the company and the search side. People working on search don't even see metrics on how their changes effect ads, let alone make decisions based on them. When I want change the way ranking works, there's a big stack of statistics I have to collect. None of them involve ads. All of them involve how useful the results are to a user.
- brudgers 15y ago
  I'll believe it when someone can explain why a search for "weather" returns the results it does. The Weather channel utilizes Google search. The Weather Underground...well name a Google service they could use and don't. Accuweather provides plausible deniablity. On the other hand, weather.gov employs some of the best meteorologists anywhere, provides the official hazardous weather warnings the other sites rely on, and has a wonderfully informative hourly weather graph for any given location. In other words, Google doesn't provide the most relevant results first when it comes to local weather in the US, it provides the most profitable. But I'm willing to read your statistical explanation for why this is so. Go ahead and make your case. Be sure to explain how the special format for the weather page is based on statistical data and not hard coded.
  - moultano 15y ago
    I get weather.gov at #3 after weather.com, and sfgate.com/weather (probably because I'm in the bay area.) Where does it rank for you? I can't get into detail explaining what goes into our rankings to you. I can tell you that I can bring up a debug view that shows all the signals that enter in to this ranking, and none of them involve "uses google products." We love for people to complain about queries. That feedback is very useful, and we always need more of it. But when our search results suck, the reason is that our system is too stupid, not that it's perversely smart at funneling you into money making opportunities.
    - brudgers 15y ago

bambax 15y ago

The author is prompt to admit that this is pure speculation on his part, and so we don't know how and why Google became what it is; but I find his explanation very convincing. Serving personalized results to users may increase click-through rates but it degrades the idea we form of what Google is and what it does.

vibrunazo 15y ago
> Serving personalized results to users may increase click-through rates but it degrades the idea we form of what Google is and what it does. If it serves me better results, then how so?
- yew 15y ago
  Better can mean 'more liked' and 'more accurate' which are not necessarily equivalent. Accuracy being something of a fuzzy category, of course.
- falling 15y ago
  Here’s how: http://dontbubble.us http://dontbubble.us I always thought that search personalization was of course better, until that page made me think about the downsides.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  Who says it serves you better results? If I type in "tea", am I searching for Tealuxe in Harvard Square or am I searching for the botanical and scientific material on a common drink or am I searching for recipes? The new "social+local" Google biases my results towards the former. A search engine used to be a tool for reaching out into the world and finding something new. Now it searches through what I already know? What's the point in that?
  - mayanksinghal 15y ago
    Search engines were never a content discovery tool for me. I use HN, Twitter, Facebook for that. Some others use Digg, Pinterest and Reddit. When I search on a search engine, I am looking for a solution to a question that I have.

disgruntledphd2 15y ago

This is a really good article. Succint, reasonably well written and interesting. That being said, one imagines that Google (despite being an advertising company) have a huge investment in the quality of search. However, because they are essentially a monopoly, many people try to game the system for their benefit. This creates an arms-race, and may be one of the root causes of this personalisation. I do agree with the main point, that this could potentially make Google less useful for us all as a whole, and will probably lead to their disruption, sooner or later.

robrenaud 15y ago

> It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine. What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer. If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv. Did it pull the one from your state? Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the state the generates the most Google searches for dmv, but the California DMV is likely relevant iff you are in California. This idea of one best search page for one query, independent of any other factors based on the user or users geography is really overly romantic and simplicistic. On the other hand, the filter bubble stuff is a nice narrative, but it mostly makes for an interesting story rather than real problem. Having worked on search personalization at Google about 5 years ago, it's just hard to make that big impact on search results with personalization. "dmv" is a nice example where it's works brilliantly, but those ambiguous queries are pretty rare, and hence the more bread and butter stuff is still really driving most of the quality.

drhayes9 15y ago
A little off-topic, but... Why is this getting down-voted? Is it because you disagree with what this person is saying? I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation. It feels like this is getting down-voted because people don't like that Google is doing these things. So, this person is getting down-voted 'cuz of Google? Huh?
- joering2 15y ago
  > I thought down-votes were only for things that didn't contribute to the conversation. yeah, well.. you need to see my posts on Apple threads.
- lkrubner 15y ago
  Sadly, Paul Graham has endorsed the idea of using the downvote to express disagreement. I personally dislike this use of the downvote, but it does have official sanction. Read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

stephengoodwin 15y ago

I agree Google has gone into a filter bubble, but the article very speculative and provides no statistics or examples to make a good point. This is a pop-science article, so I don't have high expectations.

moultano 15y ago
Why do you agree then that Google has gone into a filter bubble?
- stephengoodwin 15y ago
  Based on various other articles I've read. I would not go to an extreme and say "this is a terrible idea," but I would assert it's worthy of serious thought on how to ensure we are not limiting ourselves to the filter we've built. Nonetheless, my criticism was directed at this article for not providing at least a few examples of the results of a filter bubble.

skmurphy 15y ago

Alexis Madrigal reaches a subtle and thought provoking conclusion "The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make." This would seem to be at odds with a lot of "Big Data" evangelism but I think he is right.

stfu 15y ago

What I find fascinating is that with the sheer unlimited amount of data they have the quality of their search engine results have been stagnating for almost 10 years and no substantial break through been seen so far. The only somewhat "break through" could be seen in local searches - and saving people from adding their zip code, city or street name to their search phrase seems to be not that much impressive either.

davemel37 15y ago

this is really interesting. What People WANT and what they THINK they want are two different things...How people define and Perceive SEARCH and how they use search are two different things. I think Google is facing a SELF-DEFEATING reality that as they serve people with better results, they erode the perception of their brand in peoples eyes. There is clearly an incongruity between what people "THINK" they want from a search engine( and how they perceive Google) versus, what they "REALLY WANT" from a search engine. Conflicting priorities are always a struggle, but this is an especially interesting one. One side has a DATA supported reality that can't be disputed about what searchers want and what puts bread on the table. On the other side is the more important, but less quantifiable reality that their BRAND is what brings searches back to the site, not the quality of the results, but the perception of GOOGLE and SEARCH being synonymous. This brand value is clearly getting diluted by delivering better results, and could in the long run be their demise.

davemel37 15y ago
I almost wonder if SEARCH by definition can't and shouldn't be the end answer, but rather the journey to discovering new things and finding answers. Google is assuming that when people search, they want answers, but maybe what they really want is to SEARCH for answers.
darklajid 15y ago
The problem with the approach Google is taking, the reason why I 'left': I felt that it became harder and harder to actually get what I want (using your caps: WANT). I know it. No, you don't know better. No, I didn't misspell that, no geolocation is a bad idea for results or - worse - language. It's a mediocre service now. Became big with search, became worthless for searches for me. I cannot search anymore, I can play games with software that tries to second guess my intentions.
modeless 15y ago
This is more insightful than the article. The problem isn't optimizing for the "community" as the article seems to think. The problem really is that what people think they want and what they actually want are opposed. Facebook faces the same problem. I think the unfortunate endgame here is legislation that will require what people think they want (e.g. privacy, absolute control) at the expense of some things they actually want (e.g. frictionless social interaction, simplicity). (To forestall some argument: Yes, I realize that privacy/social interaction and control/simplicity are not always mutually exclusive. However, there are cases where they interfere with each other, which requires compromise.)

yanw 15y ago

At first search signals were mainly provided by the content itself and now signals from the user are being incorporated. There is already an established term for this and it’s not “filter bubble” or “tailoring” the term is “relevance” and it’s the core of search. If the author is suggesting that data about a user’s identity, history, and location isn't usefully to providing her with the best possible results then he should stick to writing about stuff he actually comprehends and not be the umpteenth author resorting to use “Google” in the title to whore traffic.

PaulMcCartney 15y ago

It's nice to romanticize what Google might've once been, but at the end of the day Google is a tool that provides a service. To have a qualm regarding the current user experience is a different story, but in terms of the delivery of sought after content I don't think one could argue they have taken steps anywhere but forwards.

laconian 15y ago

This article is custom tailored for the HN echo chamber. The link to PG for this article is tenuous at best.

qeorge 15y ago

It reminds me of HN itself. I don't want to know what the "average" likes to read, or even what people like me like to read. I want to know what smart, interesting people (not me!) like to read. In other words: I want curation by an expert, not the average of everyone's inputs. Google is supposed to know the right answer, not ask all my friends what the answer is and report back.

gxs 15y ago
I completely agree with you on this topic. In a similar vein, I don't want to read the average Joe's take on why he loves the iPad 3 so much (I usually abstain from commenting, though lately I've said what the hey) - I want to hear what smart, more enlightened people have to say. That was the real value of HN for me when I first got on years ago. It was hearing from people like patio11 when the topic of SEO came up. The thread recently where Jordan Mendelson (napster hacker) chimed regarding Napster's back end is the quintessential example of what I'm talking about.

nextstep 15y ago

Does anyone know an easy way to prevent Google from tailoring my search results based off my location? I don't want to use a proxy, because then the results would just be tailored to that (false) location.

EventHorizon 15y ago
More Search Tools : Verbatim?
mtrimpe 15y ago
I know pws=0 works for turning off personalized search.

chanderson0 15y ago

The "personalization" of the web is not a Google-specific phenomenon. I am, at this very moment, sitting in a session at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit where a marketer from Toyota is espousing personalizing site content to users. This practice is being pushed _hard_ to all businesses here as a central theme of growth of the internet. In the sense that this drives better business, it certainly will be. Don't expect to go to Toyota.com and see the same experience as your neighbor anymore.

gfaremil 15y ago

Discovery and personalization are not compatible with each other. So if you use Google search as a discovery tool, then personalization hurts. There is no alternative. Maybe DDG but results are not so good.

mladenkovacevic 15y ago

I feel like there's a recent anti-Google sentiment among the hacker/techie community which seems very unsubstantiated by solid reasoning or logic. The argument in particular, that search quality is getting worse, is a little lost on me because, for me or anyone I talk to at least, this is simply not true. In fact, I find myself spending less and less time on "Google the Search Engine" because it's gotten so damn good at giving me the right result right away based on the simplest and vaguest keywords (I use the omnibar so I don't even go to google.com anymore). I still remember not so long ago having to try different phrasings of my search keywords a number of times before I would get the result I was looking for on the main page (or in cases of extreme frustration clicking through pages and pages of search results). This is largely not the case anymore. From my general interactions with people and how they use the web, anecdotal as it may be, they simply doesn't give a shit about ads, filter bubbles and so on. Google Search hasn't changed for them in any meaningful way except that it's gotten a lot better at figuring out what they wanted to find (and in most cases they are not even conscious of that improvement over time). With regards to other other free G-services (Gmail, Docs, G+, Blogger, YouTube), if you are consciously buying into them, it is implied that you know you are entering into a relationship where parts of the real-estate you're interacting with might be used to display ads and I think everyone understands and accepts that. I am an avid conspiracy theorist, however, and have more long-term concerns about what happens if Google turns TRULY evil and starts to use its data to spy on citizens on behalf of some authoritarian government. But as of right now I feel a little foolish reacting to this concern in any significant way.

bartwe 15y ago
For me the feeling of reduced quality is that when i don't find the answer on the first page, that i have less luck with additional keywords and more pages then i think i used to have. These queries are mostly trying to cast a wide net with some errorcodes or stacktraces and seeing if others reported similar problems.
JBiserkov 15y ago
I personally have to modes: 1. I already know what I'm looking for: a particular website, post, comment, the lyrics of a song that I know a part of. 2. I have a question, I don't know the answer, but I'll recognize it when I see it. In my experience Google is getting better at type 1 '(re)discovery/popularity' search and worse at type 2 'exploratory/specificity' search. Depending on the ratio of type 1 vs type 2 in your search habits, Google results will get better/worse for you. They introduced Verbatim search to solve the specifity problem, but in my experience it hardly ever works :(

toddnessa 15y ago

The article points out reasons as to why many of us are leaving Google for other search engines that protect our private data by not recording our search information. Startpage for instance does not track your private data. You will not have your IP address recorded or have tracking cookies put on your computer. I know we now live in a world where it is difficult to get away from Google altogether. It seems like they want to collect data on everybody in various ways. However, many of us are beginning to try. My gmail account may be the next to go.

6ren 15y ago

The Dr. Frankenstein in me loves the idea of an automated data-driven business: generic algorithm + A-B testing + payment mechanism. If you could also automate litigation... running many in parallel, a useful monster might one day emerge. Evolution has worked well elsewhere. The real problem is an exponential search space, and time/experiments needed to explore it. The problem of giving people what they want is also the problem of markets and democracy in general. Fortunately for us buyers/citizens, we usually eventually realize what we really want - unfortunately for the vendor/politician catering to what we previously thought we wanted. There's an appeal to Jobs' approach: make what they will want once they've see it. Far superior to creating/governing by numbers.

jroseattle 15y ago

With the "old" Google, a search made me feel as though I'd stepped into the potential realm of answers to my query. The most relevant, to me, was the stuff that mapped to my query the best -- nothing more, but nothing less. Now, I feel like I'm living in the law of averages. I'm not interested in the average; I want the top of the scale. I really do not want social and local and all the other unknown contexts involved in giving me what's right "for me". With all the contextual crap, I feel like now I get the "less". I wish they let me have the option of turning it all off, and just going with content-based search. Of course, they have to filter out the crap that's being generated to game their search index, but outside of that -- give me what the web has.

amorphid 15y ago
You can get the unpersonalized version when needed. Simply log out of your Google account. Yoi can use a different browser, too.