> in its latest attempt to deliver more personal responses more quickly
I liked it better when the web was impersonal, when you actually had to make an effort to filter out the information you didn't want. As more and more of the top of your search results get cluttered with things that Big Bro knows that you want, the less and less you are exposed to the world of things that you never knew you might take an interest in.
Search used to be a way to find marvelous new gems in the ocean of Internet. Now it's just a reaffirmation of your favorite repertoires, leaving you with the ultimate confirmation bias in everything you read, buy, and think about. These days, I can rarely find anything with Google that I didn't already know about, read about, write about, etc. Half the time, I use Google as a bookmark manager ... heck, I might as well just search my browser history. Throwing email history into the mix will only accelerate this trend, shoving each of us even deeper into our own little holes in the ground. Search has become boring, an incubator for egocentric brats, and a place where political diversity goes to die ... all in the name of personalization, i.e. ad revenue.
Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged out and freshly rid of cookies.
> Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me
> non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and
> Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged
> out and freshly rid of cookies.
I don't notice any significant difference in personalized vs non-personalized results, though personalized results are occasionally more useful.
If you really don't want Google to return personalized results, then click the "Hide personal results" icon in the top right. This is less annoying than having to clear all your cookies.
I think the concern with clearing all cookies is not simply to not see the personalized results but that the cookies are actually tracking the person's usage.
Google in recent times has gotten so creepy that I never stay logged in. Same with Facebook btw.
While I agree with you that accidental discovery is sometimes valuable, it seems like introducing you to things you weren't necessarily looking for was an unintended side effect of how the web originally worked. The goal was to help you find what you were looking for, but because it didn't always work completely, you sometimes ended up finding what you were not looking for.
What's interesting is that while Google is narrowing down on what you are specifically looking for in search, it is simultaneously introducing a product that is designed to suggest things you have not explicitly asked for: Google Now. It will be interesting to see if they can provide the discovery functionality that you want with a product that is specifically designed to perform that function, rather than one that does so unintentionally.
It's not accidental discovery per se that I miss. I'm more worried about the subtle moral, social and political implications that the loss of impersonal information might bring about. Will Google rank negative information about my favorite Congressional candidate lower in its search results, because I often email my friends with positive information about him? How long before a Wikipedia article about some scientific fact gets ranked below misinformation that an annoying relative has emailed me about 20 times last year? I'm a firm believer in the idea that the best way to make most people open-minded is to force them to confront diversity in their daily lives. But the more you are surrounded with personalized stuff that appeal to your appetites, the less likely you are to confront the Other. Of course I don't want Google forcing anyone to read anything, but I don't want them to discourage people from reading certain things, either. I want my information sorted by relevance, not anyone's political biases. Accidental discovery was not an unintended side effect of the design of the web. It is a natural consequence of the fact that facts are impersonal.
I'm also not sure whether something like Google Now could fill the role of completely unpersonalized, "objective" information. It is still personalized in the sense that the algorithm is tainted by my current preferences, so it might confirm my biases in more subtle ways. In fact, Google has every incentive to show me results that please my palate as much as possible. "Worried about Obamacare? Why don't you check out this fundamentalist's blog?"
I liked it better when the web was impersonal, when you actually had to make an effort to filter out the information you didn't want. As more and more of the top of your search results get cluttered with things that Big Bro knows that you want, the less and less you are exposed to the world of things that you never knew you might take an interest in.
Search used to be a way to find marvelous new gems in the ocean of Internet. Now it's just a reaffirmation of your favorite repertoires, leaving you with the ultimate confirmation bias in everything you read, buy, and think about. These days, I can rarely find anything with Google that I didn't already know about, read about, write about, etc. Half the time, I use Google as a bookmark manager ... heck, I might as well just search my browser history. Throwing email history into the mix will only accelerate this trend, shoving each of us even deeper into our own little holes in the ground. Search has become boring, an incubator for egocentric brats, and a place where political diversity goes to die ... all in the name of personalization, i.e. ad revenue.
Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged out and freshly rid of cookies.