Google News now has a “Suggested for you” section with stories likely to match your interests. See my section today. The goal is to surface narrow and local topics specific to you. You can tweak by saying ‘Not interested’ until it’s more to your liking. The topics and stories shown here will change with the news, to keep things fresh and serendipitous. Nice work Google News team!
Here’s what it looks like:
Some might say this will only contribute to the “filter bubble” issue, which would suggest that “narrowing” news for people isn’t necessarily a good thing.
As previously reported, Google has expanded its field trial for Gmail results on web search results pages. Now, it includes Google Drive and Google Content (though you have to actually sign up for the new field trial to get these features). While these aren’t yet features that are available to all users, they are the latest sign of Google’s move to a more unified Google experience across its products.
Today, many people think about Google as a search engine, with YouTube as a separate site for videos, Google+ as a social networking destination, Google Docs/Drive as a product for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Picasa Web Albums as a place to keep photos, Gmail as a place for email, etc. It makes sense. Each of these products have specific things they do. However, Google doesn’t want you to necessarily think of these things as separate products. They want you to think of them as useful features of Google. One big, great Google experience that can meet all of your online needs.
With the new field trial, not only can you access Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar content from web search results, you can do so from Gmail results. Google is not only unifying its products, it’s unifying the search experience to some extent. How long before you can access content from any of Google’s products from the search box on another of its products. How long before you can find YouTube videos from a Google Docs search or Google+ results from a YouTube search? Picasa Web Albums content from a Gmail search?
Google has made other changes over the last couple weeks that fit into this line of thinking. For example, Google is now letting you see user reviews of local businesses from people’s Google Profiles. Google launched a familiar navigation system on its mobile homepage, reflecting the desktop version, which easily gets users to various Google products, as if they were simply features of Google.
Meanwhile, Google is already finding ways to improve search features of its various products. In recent months, we’ve seen Google launch updates to Gmail search. Just this week, Google made one to Google Drive search, enabling you to access menu functionality right from the search box.
While Google continues to integrate its various products with one another, it also continues to shut down numerous services. In some cases, these products just go away. In others, certain key functionalities go on to appear in other existing Google products. As giant as Google is, it has been slimming down and becoming more simplified little by little ever since Larry Page took over as CEO.
The Filter Bubble
The side effects of all of this simplification and integration are interesting. Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo highlighted one of them in a new video. That would be the “filter bubble“. Google, with its ability to use your data from product to product, is finding more ways to personalize your search experience. This new Gmail/Google Drive integration into web search results is a prime example. You’re seeing more content that is specific to you. Nobody else will get these search results.
DuckDuckGo’s whole point is that by personalizing the search experience to each user, Google is limiting access to information outside of this personalized bubble. You may never see results that other people are seeing, which could bring new perspective to whatever it is that you are searching for. They make the specific point of mentioning politically charged queries. The thinking is that you’ll never see the opposing viewpoints if you keep seeing results tailored to your existing biases.
Competition
There are three major themes that continue to dominate the conversation around Google’s strategy, and they’re all directly related: personalization, privacy and competition. The personalization (at least to some degree) is directly affected by the privacy policy, which is needed for Google to better compete against its rivals. Google has flat out said as much.
“Users are accustomed to their products working together, and expect this consistent experience across their Google Account,” the company wrote in a letter to the French data protection authority, the CNIL, which is leading the EU’s assault on Google’s privacy policy. “The use of a primary privacy policy that covers many products and enables the sharing of data between them is an industry standard approach adopted by companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and Apple.”
These, in addition to Amazon, are Google’s chief rivals. Meanwhile, these rivals continue to make moves that position them to better compete with Google. Interestingly enough, this is all shaking out at a time when Google faces antitrust battles with the EU and the FTC. Any regulation that may arise from these could severely hinder Google’s progress in the unification of its features at a time when such unification is at its most critical from a competitive standpoint.
Two of those competitors – Apple and Yahoo – just made significant hires that should enable them to compete at an even higher level against Google. Apple just got a major search player to lead its Siri unit, and Yahoo, now run by an historically critical Googler – Marissa Mayer – just took away Google’s President of Media, Mobile and Platforms Worldwide (not to mention other Googlers she’s managed to lure away in her short time at the company). How many more Googlers will follow Mayer over to Yahoo, which has been competing with Google since Google was launched?
Colorado congressman Jarid Polis, a tech entrepreneur himself, has come out against any antitrust regulation of Google. In a letter to the FTC, he wrote, “While Google is surely a big company and an important service in people’s lives, my constituents also use a variety of competing services, including Amazon.com for shopping, iTunes for music and movies, Facebook for social networking and recommendations, and mobile apps like Yelp for finding local businesses. Competition is only a click away and there are no barriers to competition; if I created a better search algorithm I could set up a server in my garage and compete globally with Google. To even discuss applying anti-trust in this kind of hyper-competitive environment defies all logic and the very underpinnings of anti-trust law itself.”
He’s absolutely right about being able to start his own search engine if he wanted to. DuckDuckGo has done it, and from what I understand, has managed to gain a modest user base in a space many felt it was impossible to penetrate. It’s not a major player in search, but it’s a player nonetheless, and people can use it if they want. Some do.
It’s not these smaller players that Google must contend with, however. At least not for the foreseeable future. It’s the big players that both Google and Polis mentioned – the players like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Yahoo. The players that have a lot of money to throw around on new products and services, as well as marketing. Antitrust and even privacy policy restrictions placed on Google could disrupt Google’s ability to make changes it needs to make to stay relevant and compete with these other giants (Facebook, by the way, is the top global brand, according to a new report from General Sentiment). Apple products, in case you haven’t heard, are pretty popular too. Especially the mobile ones (where Facebook use happens to be growing like a weed, not to mention that increased integration with Facebook that Apple’s mobile operating system has introduced with its latest update – an update that also reduced user exposure to Google through its Maps offering).
The point is, that as hard as it is to imagine Google going away, other companies have been on top in the past, and have slid down considerably. Microsoft was obviously dealt a huge blow by antitrust regulation years ago, which some would say it has still not fully recovered from. As Polis said in his letter, “Several years ago, we called firms like AOL, MySpace and Yahoo ‘dominant’ — but those firms have struggled to retain consumers online. Given how easily consumers can switch to a new service with just one click, regulators should be wary of intervening in the tremendous competition online.”
For all of the outcry from competitors over Google’s business practices, and the scrutiny from authorities, it’s stil not clear how much consumers actually believe they are being hurt by Google’s dominance on the Internet, or by their recently updated privacy policy. Personalization? The jury’s still out on that one too.
DuckDuckGo is following Bing’s lead with a new ad telling you why its results are better than Google’s. Unlike Bing’s “Bing It On” campaign, however, DuckDuckGo isn’t pushing a blind taste test of side-by-side search results. They’re simply telling you that you’re getting different results than everybody else because of the “filter bubble,” and that you could be missing out on stuff just because it doesn’t fit the profile of what Google thinks you should be seeing.
Google personalizing results is nothing new, as anyone who follows the industry knows, though I’m not sure how common this knowledge is to the average user. I’m not sure how often the average user thinks about this or even cares, to be honest.
Earlier this year, Google updated its privacy policy to consolidate numerous policies from its various products into one that can cover most of them, and enable the company to use data from service to service so that it can better personalize the user experience. This is, in fact, something that is even still causing drama in Europe. The EU is expected to tell Google it can’t do this on Tuesday, though it’s been doing it for months.
Google has not hidden from any of this, however, and maintains that a personalized experience is a better experience, and many would likely agree.
DuckDuckGo makes the point that Google is still personalizing searches even for signed out users, and says it had 131 who weren’t signed into Google perfrom searches for three different political queries (abortion, gun control and Obama), with a “wide variance” in resulting links, as it’s put in a Talking Points Memo article on the study.
There’s an interesting Kickstarter project called Gooey Search, which bills itself as “Google on Steroids with Privacy”. It was developed by a small software company called Visual Purple. The tool comes in the form of an iPad app, as well as a Firefox add-on. I would assume it would be expanded to other platforms, should it reach its funding goal.
Visual Purple’s Megan Rutherford reached out to us to tell us a little about the project. First, check out the video:
“We’ve been building bleeding-edge technology and advanced training simulations for years,” she says. “Recently, we developed and launched a professional data discovery tool for analysts and researchers. The tool is GisterPRO, and does some very powerful things such as read unstructured data – things computers don’t normally like to read.”
“We agonized over finding a way to bring this technology to the rest of us,” she adds. “Then, we stumbled upon Kickstarter.”
“Like most people, Google is our go-to search engine,” the Kickstarter page says. “From our extensive study of the mathematics of language, we found a great way to combine smart web bots and intelligent reading technology. Our technology reads every Google result, strips out the spam, and bubbles up only the best results along with the strongest concepts in a kinetic, Gooey Graph.”
It strips out the spam and bubbles up the best results? Maybe Google should be checking this out as a possible acquisition target, given all the complaints that have been going around regarding the Penguin update.
“Instead of marketing tags, these concepts are discovered entities that empower you to interact with and explore Google results like never before. Gooey makes search fun and rewarding for kids of all ages,” the page continues. “All you have to do is type your search terms into the search bar (just like you would any Google search). We issue your search to Google but our smart bots literally check every result returned – verifying each link and reading each document for you.”
“On the right side of the Graphic User Interface (GUI for short) is Gooey Graph – an alive, real-time network diagram of discovered concepts,” the page explains. “Just play with Gooey Graph by deleting or stacking concepts to quickly sort results and find what you need.”
Rutherford says Gooey Search is designed to bring “professional-grade data discovery technology to the rest of us”.
“The sub-rosa story is that Gooey brings complete privacy, anonymity and automatic entity extraction to Google searches while neutralizing ‘Filter Bubble’ biasing of search results,” she says.
Yahoo has a new page you can go to and see how many people are on the Yahoo homepage at any given time, as well as the most viewed stories by gender, age group, interest and city (for select cities).
“More than 13 million personalized story combinations are delivered every single day on the Yahoo.com Today module, and it happens within milliseconds of someone logging on,” a Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews.
She also shares the following stats:
– More women (53%) than men (47%) read the article about Gisele Bundchen criticizing her husband Tom Brady’s teammates for the Patriots’ Super Bowl loss. In total, 67.7 million people read the article.
– More men (56%) than women (44%) watched the recap of “The Bachelor” episode on Monday, 2/6 when a contestant was confronted about her secret boyfriend. And you thought only girls watched The Bachelor.
– ‘Mad cow disease diagnosed in Bay Area’ tops the list of most viewed articles in the Bay Area yesterday.
– The most viewed article in New York City today was ‘Former ‘Home Alone’ star’s startling new look.’
The point of all of this appears to be that Yahoo’s breadth of content is serving all kinds of people with different interests, which is why the company is headed for more of a filter bubble approach – taking what you like and feeding you more of it.
Yahoo is doing this with what it calls C.O.R.E. That stands for Content Optimization and Relevance Engine, which Yahoo Labs developed to surface stories based on interest and reader behavior.
“Every hour C.O.R.E. processes 1.2 terrabytes of data in order to learn how a user’s behaviors and interests influence the likelihood of clicking on a specific article,” the Yahoo spokesperson says. “And, every day, C.O.R.E. personalizes 2.2 billion pieces of content for Yahoo! users.”
“Since optimizing with C.O.R.E., Yahoo!’s Homepage click-through rate has increased 300%,” she adds. “Yahoo!’s personalization approach is a clever mix of scientific algorithms and human judgment, as editors have control to override C.O.R.E. at any time, to ensure certain stories are seen. Initially developed within Yahoo! Labs, C.O.R.E. has become a vital tool used throughout the day by editors across the company to bring our users personalized news, first.”
In an interview with AdAge, Mike Kerns, Yahoo’s VP-social and personalizatio, likened Yahoo’s system to offerings from Pandora, Zite or Amazon. It will give Yahoo feedback, he said, so they can “start showing them very obviously that they’re seeing content based on what we know we think about you or what we think we know about you.”
“So my wife clicks on ‘I want more of Gisele,’ and the next time we see her we’ll weight that explicit declaration along with everything else we’re personalizing based on behavior, and other people like her,” he is quoted as saying.
Today, C.O.R.E. powers content on many Yahoo! properties, including Yahoo! News and the Today Module. There, editors write and gather the most important and engaging stories of the day, and C.O.R.E. determines how stories should be ordered, dependent on each user. Similarly, C.O.R.E. figures out which story categories (i.e. technology, health, finance, or entertainment) should be displayed prominently on the page to help deepen engagement for each viewer.
What’s unique here is not just the innovative C.O.R.E. algorithms that crunch this amount of data all day, every day – but that it’s also the perfect marriage of deep science and a world-class editorial team.
Editors use C.O.R.E. and their editorial judgment to ensure that important stories are front and center. For example, Yahoo! editors made sure that the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death was on everyone’s page the moment the news broke. An algorithm couldn’t have done that.
No mention is made of Yahoo Voices, which essentially took the place of Yahoo’s Associated Content content farm, but I don’t see why this wouldn’t be implemented there as well.
Google just announced some new elements it is bringing to Google Search: personal results, profiles in search, and people and pages. They’re billing the changes collectively as “Search, Plus Your World”.
Now, Google has been doing personalized search to some extent for quite a while. Likewise, profiles have appeared in search results for quite some time. The new features are different in that the personal results will let users find info specifically for them. This may include Google+ photos and posts of their own and things that have been shared with them. Profiles will appear in both autocomplete and results. The “people and pages” feature comes in to enable users to find people profiles and Google+ pages related to topic areas of interest, and make it easy for users to follow these people.
“Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more,” says Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.”
Here’s a video Google put together showcasing the “search, plus your world” concept:
“As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty,” says Singhal, sharing an example of where the new features may prove useful. “A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.”
In terms of Profiles appearing in search, Google is demonstrating why it can pay off in search visibility to be active on Google+ and develop a substantial following. Before it was clear that this was beneficial, but now, you can see directly where this will help you. Not only will Google show people you are friends with, but it will show people it thinks you would be interested in.
Google says it will show autocomplete predictions for “various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program”. You can see this in action here:
People can click on these results and easily add the person to their circles on Google+.
It doesn’t look like brand pages will be showing up as autocomplete predictions. When asked about this, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “For profiles in search, you will see an autocomplete prediction for people who have Google+ profiles. These are people you’re connected to or popular people related to the query. For Google+ Pages, there’s Direct Connect (launched back in Nov).”
Google is also showing people who discuss certain topics frequenty on Google+ in a special section on the right side of the search results page, when the user searches for that topic (such as “music” or “baseball”) :
Privacy
“When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World,” says Singhal. “Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.”
That move was a bit controversial in the SEO community, as it made referrals harder to track. Not everyone was buying the privacy explanation Google was selling, but today’s new features do make that a little more believable. Google doesn’t want to face the kind of privacy backlash it did when it first launched Google Buzz in Gmail.
Google is providing privacy controls for search, similar to those found in Google+. Personal results are marked as “Public,” “Limited,” or “Only You,” which will be familiar to Google+ users. People in results are marked with the Google+ Circles they are in, or as suggested connections.
In addition to all of that, there is a toggle that appears on the upper right of the results page, where you can see what your search results look like without the personal content:
Turning it off will eliminate personalization based on web history as well. The toggle itself is for an individual search session, but you can also make it the default by going to your search settings and setting it that way.
Filter Bubble
While the new features will have their benefits to users for sure (at least for Google+ users), it would appear that they will only add to the “filter bubble” problem. The filter bubble, a phrased coined by Eli Pariser in a famous TED Talk (below), is this concept where the content we consume online is being more and more personalized towards us based on what sites know about us. The sites take this information that they have about us and direct us toward content that they think would be better for us.
While this may be convenient at times, some feel the filter bubble is keeping us from expanding our horizons. It’s making it harder to see things out of the box. It’s an obstacle to encountering great content that we might not see because we don’t have a direct connection to it. There are valid points to both sides of the debate (feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments).
Google is by no stretch the only site engaging in this filter bubble concept, but given its massive reach and enormous search market share, it is arguably the most important site on the web to be considered with regards to said concept.
Is Google moving in the right direction?
Why Google’s Personalized Search is Still Lacking
Filter bubble aside, there is a use for personalized search, and despite Google being the king of search, there are obstacles keeping Google from the best it could be when it comes to organizing the world’s information. The lack of a deal with Twitter for realtime search is a prime example of this.
If Google could provide these new kinds of search results for Twitter and Facebook content and profiles, it would be a lot better. Google+ is a solid social network, but it’s not Facebook or Twitter in terms of user numbers. That makes it inferior for access to a broader set of information. That could change in time, but right now, that’s just how it is. Even if Google+ is able to achieve Facebook-like numbers, it still won’t be complete without Facebook.
In fact, it’s for this reason that tools like those from Wajam and Greplin still have a place for those seeking truly personalized search.
Still, the features really emphasize Google’s confidence in Google+ going forward. The fact that they continue to alter their flagship product – search – so much, with an increasing Google+ flavor indicates that they view Google+ as much more than Google Buzz or Google Wave (previous social offerings). Google+ just may be here to stay.
“Search, Plus Your World” is rolling out over the next few days to signed in users searching on https://www.google.com in English.
Bing is rolling out what it calls “Adaptive Search.” The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”
“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the “filter bubble” it’s essentially the idea that content that we consume on the web is being filtered by the sites we use as a way of personalizing our experience and making it more relevant to us. It can reduce noise, but it also means we’re missing out on some things, and it is something of a controversial topic. We’ve discussed this more in depth in past articles, which you can find here.
Explaining how Adaptive Search works, the Bing representative tells us, “At the risk of generalizing, let’s say you’re a film fanatic and when you search for ‘Australia’ you aren’t likely searching for Australia the country. You’re probably searching for Australia the 2008 movie. Bing will take into account the fact you often search for movies and adapt the search page to show relevant movie results higher up on the page. This helps decrease your time spent searching and increases time spent buttering your popcorn.”
Here’s a video discussing Adaptive Search:
It’s rolling out over the next few days, but if you want to use it, you can just turn on your Search History and then search.
We recently asked readers of Google and Facebook should be filtering our content for us? Many of you said no, but that’s what both have been doing for quite some time through various forms of personalization. It’s partially about noise reduction, and being served the content that is most relevant to us, but by doing this, we are living our online lives in what has come to be known as the “Filter Bubble”.
Google and Facebook aren’t the only two companies filtering our content this way. Many services do this kind of personalization. Just this week, AOL launched a new iPad Magazine, which is based on serving personalized content for each user. Google and Facebook are two of the most dominant sources of information, however. While Google hopes to play a bigger role in how we see information from our friends, brands, and those we’re influenced by on the social level, that role currently belongs to Facebook as the world’s dominant social network. It’s how the majority of social Internet users engage with content this way.
Eli Pariser, who coined the term “Filter Bubble” gave a popular TED Talk a while back discussing the concept in which he quoted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”
This would appear to be the philosophy behind the Facebook News Feed as it currently exists. You may “like” CNN, who might be running a story about people dying in Africa, but you might miss that if Facebook’s algorithm determines that you’d be more interested in seeing the bit about the squirrel from one of your neighbors.
The point is, you’re not seeing everything. What makes it more interesting is that the more Pages you “like” which should theoretically give you access to more information from sources you care about, the more information you’re going to miss, because all of these pages are competing with one another for that spot in your News Feed that you actually see.
Granted, Facebook’s strategy makes sense in some ways, because too much information is simply just too hard to consume, and it’s highly likely that you’ll miss some of it anyway, just because it will get pushed further down. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a completely unfiltered option? A way to see every single update from every single friend and Page you’ve associated yourself with on Facebook?
Remember – you’re the one that chose to become friends with these people or “like” these pages. You control that.
Well, it appears Facebook may be readying a new News Feed that will give us this unfiltered look at our social graph. A new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that Facebook is going to be changing the way the News Feed works sometime soon.
Shayndi Raice And Emily Steel report: “Now Facebook engineers are working to create an unfiltered News Feed that would open the floodgates of information about users and the games they win, the companies they ‘Like’ and the actions their friends take, said people familiar with the matter.”
I’m going to assume that such a version of the feed would be one option for viewing the feed. As it stands now, Facebook gives you options like Top News, Most Recent, Status Updates, Photos, Links, Pages, Questions, and of course various lists you may have set up yourself. It gives you plenty of ways to filter the News Feed, but not so much a way to get a completely unfiltered version. Most Recent is the closest thing, but even that isn’t 100% unfiltered.
It will be interesting to see if Google opens up an unfiltered version of the Google+ stream. Google’s “circles” only add to the filter bubble concept, for the reasons we discussed here. People will be more inclined to share with select groups of people, leaving those outside of the circles potentially missing out on interesting content. Google even filters the streams for specific Circles too though. You don’t see every update from everyone in every Circle.
Expanded “Like” Button Functionality
According to the WSJ report, “Facebook is also working on expanding its ‘Like’ button to include other gestures that marketers and third-party developers can create, said these people. Consumers could share information about the products they want to buy or the places they want to go, for instance.”
While we don’t know exactly what this will entail, simply giving consumers more ways to share your brand/products could be huge for businesses, particularly in combination with an unfiltered News Feed, which should by itself get your brand in front of more eyeballs automatically.
As it stands right now, there are things you have to take into consideration if you want to optimize for the News Feed, and “EdgeRank,” which is the basis for Facebook’s news feed algorithm. Earlier this year, we looked at a report from Buddy Media, a company that’s built a business out of creating Facebook tools for businesses and counts a bunch of major brands among its clients. They suggested the following ten tips for boosting your chances of getting seen in the news feed:
1. Ask questions
2. Post games and trivia
3. Interact with fan engagement
4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
5. Incorporate relevant photos
6. Relate to current events
7. Incorporate videos
8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
9. Include links within posts
10. Be explicit in your posts
If Facebook’s unfiltered News Feed is just an option, you’re probably still going to want to consider these things, because it’s still going to be helpful to get into the filtered feed as well. Plus, these things are simply good for engaging users.
The “Filter Bubble” has been a hot topic of discussion this week. This is based on the concept recently discussed in a TED Talk by Eli Pariser, which is essentially about the information we’re consuming being filtered by the websites we use to consume it. Thinks Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Huffington Post, etc.
These sites (and many others) are feeding us information tailored to us on a personalized level. Algorithms are attempting to provide relevant content based on what they think we want. The problem with this, for many who view it as a problem, is that content is essentially being filtered out without our say in the matter.
When we entered the discussion, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo had just put out an infographic-based site DontBubble.us, talking about the concept (and plugging DuckDuckGo). Now, Founder Gabriel Weinberg is talking about this more, saying that the “real Filter Bubble debate” is not so much about whether segregating results based on personal information is good o not, but over which personal signals should be used, what controls we should have as users, and what results arise from the use of the signals presented. On his blog, he writes:
The central point of the Filter Bubble argument is that showing different people different results has consequences. By definition, you are segregating, grouping and then promoting results based on personal information, which necessitates less diversity in the result set since other results have to get demoted in the process. Of course you can introduce counter-measures to increase diversity, but that is just mitigating the degree to which it is happening. Consequences that follow from less diversity are things like increasing partisanship and decreasing exposure to alternative viewpoints.
My view is that when it comes to search engines in particular, the use of personal information should be as explicit and transparent as possible, with active user involvement in creating their profiles and fine-grained control over how they are used. Personalization is not a black and white feature. It doesn’t have to be on or off. It isn’t even one-dimensional. At a minimum users should know which factors are being used and at best they should be able to choose which factors are being used, to what degree and in what contexts.
If you do not do that, and instead rely on implicit inference from passive data collection (searches, clicks, etc.), then the search engine is just left to “guess” at your personal profile. And that’s why the examples from The Filter Bubble seem creepy to a lot of people. It seems like the search engine algorithm has inferred political affiliation, job, etc. without being explicitly told by the user.
Here’s video from the Filter Bubble talk, which illustrates what he’s talking about:
There are times when filtering results makes sense, as Weinberg points out, such as movie listings by zip code, for example. I don’t know about you, but I don’t mind having results that are actually relevant to me based on certain elements like this, but Weinberg’s point about control is certainly a good once. Should Google and Facebook give us more control over what is being filtered from our search results or news feeds?
I don’t think many would complain about having more control.
If control is the answer to the Filter Bubble, it makes the timing of this debate even more interesting, considering the FTC is investigating Google’s business practices.
“We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you,” Google’s Amit Singhal said in Google’s blog post addressing the investigation. This is more about what you can do with your data should you choose to take it away from Google. Not so much about what you can do with your data while Google is using it.
That said, Google does provide quite a few different search options and ways users can refine their searches. If you want a broader political spectrum of results, you it shouldn’t be hard to find, by simply looking at different publications known for their respective biases and viewpoints. If you’re not sure which publications subscribe to which ideologies (for those that do have clear bias), you can simply Google them and find more information about that. It’s not that hard.
Control may be the answer to the Filter Bubble, but you have no greater control, at least in the case of search, than to simply exercise your own ability to research and adjust your queries. Google tries to make as good a guess about the results it thinks will be most relevant to you personally through a variety of factors, but in the end, it’s an algorithm trying to determine this, and it’s never going to be 100% accurate.
Facebook’s a little different. It’s harder to control what you see in the News Feed. You have the ability to block things, but it’s harder to know when things are being hidden without your knowledge. I guess it gives you a reason to visit people’s Walls more often.
Is the personalization of the Internet a step backwards? Is the wealth of information that is accessible to us being reduced because the products we use are filtering it all so heavily? This is a discussion that has been gaining momentum in recent weeks.
Do you want your search results and news tailored to your tastes, or do you want more control? Let us know in the comments.
The topic was brought up most recently by alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which calls out the major search engines for being too heavy on the content filtering. DuckDuckGo has set up a site at DontBubble.us, which provides something of a graphical slideshow to illustrate its point. If you strip out all of the graphics and sub-text, it reads:
When you search the Internet, search engines now show different results to different people. Results are tailored to who you are, based on your search history and your click history. Since you often click on things you agree with, you keep getting more and more of what you already agree with, which means other stuff gets demoted (effectively filtered). This begs the question: what are you missing?
In other words, you are living in a Filter Bubble that promotes things it thinks you’ll like, and demotes (effectively filters) out some of the rest, which may limit your exposure to opposing information. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to pop your filter bubble, because the technology is used so much across the Internet.
Then it turns into an ad for DuckDuckGo:
We offer you an alternative: a search engine that breaks you out of your Filter Bubble by default, plus other differences like real privacy.
Founder Gabriel Weinberg discussed these differences with WebProNews in an interview earlier this year:Of course, DuckDuckGo is not above some level of filtering. It’s already pre-filtered out results from sites like eHow, which many may applaud, but others may not appreciate. For all of the controversy that’s surrounded eHow, it also has its fans, and Demand Media, which owns it, claims to be taking action to make its quality better. The point is, there is some level of filtering going on, though this is more at the human level, than at the personalized algorithmic level.
Pariser had some interesting things to say, speaking directly to executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies, who were in the audience. In his presentation, he included a couple of interesting quotes – from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt:
“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” – MZ
“It will very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” – ES
Pariser talked about being a political progressive, but liking to hear what conservatives have to say, but noticing that all of the conservative posts had disappeared from his Facebook News Feed because Facebook had noticed he was clicking more on liberal links than conservative ones.
“Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the web,” he said. “Google’s doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something even right now at the same time, we may get very different search results…There is no standard Google anymore.”
This is a fairly well-known fact, but that doesn’t make it any less of a nightmare for SEOs.
He talked about having several of his friends search for “Egypt” and send him screenshots of their results, only to find they were very different. One person didn’t even have any stories about the recent protests, and this was apparently while they were the “big story of the day”. He went on to note that many sites (mentioning the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Yahoo News) are engaging in some kind of personalized content delivery behavior
If you take all of these filters/algorithms together, you get a filter bubble, he says – your own personal unique bubble of info, which depends upon who you are and what you do, and “you don’t decide what gets in . You don’t actually see what gets edited out.”
He equates the phenomenon to the “passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,” with the humans being traditional human news editors. If algorithms are going to curate the world and decide what to show us, he says, we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to relevance, but that they will also show us things that challenge us or make us uncomfortable – basically give us other points of view.
“We need you to give us some control,” he told the executives in the audience.
I might argue that we as users do have control. In the end, we’re choosing what services to use, what people or brands to follow, what publications to read, etc. If you’re limiting your content intake to what Facebook is showing you in the news feed, what Google is returning in search results, etc. then yes, you are succumbing to the algorithmic editors. He makes some great points.
However, in the end, it is still up to us humans to dictate how we go about consuming our information. Even Google and Facebook have ways that let us see what we want, in terms of news. You can use Google Reader, for example, and subscribe to every RSS feed your heart desires, and you can see every headline from every publication offering these feeds. It can be quite a task to get through all of your feeds, if you’re subscribed to too many, but you are still in control of how you consume that information. If you want conflicting view points, you can subscribe to both Fox News and MSNBC.
If Google is returning you MSNBC links for news searches, you can go to Fox News and search for the same topics there. And vice versa.
All of that said, it can certainly get more complex when you’re talking about non-news content, there’s a lot of gray area.
Google’s 57 Signals
He also says a Google engineer told him that Google has 57 signals that it looks at to personally tailor your query results. These signals, I presume, are a certain subset of the over 200 overall ranking signals Google employs with its algorithm. Pariser says the 57 includes things like what kind of computer you’re on, what browser you’re using, and where you’re located. Google doesn’t like to get into signal-naming too much, though it does let us know about certain ones from time to time.
René Pickhardt, a Webscience PHD student, took a crack at naming at least 40 of them. These are by no means confirmed by Google, but it’s an interesting compilation. It includes things like: search history, frequency of searches, age, sex, use of advanced search commands, etc.
In the end, there is simply a ridiculous amount of information at our disposal, being uploaded to the web every single second. The concept of the filter bubble charges that our access to all of this is limited by what the algorithmic gatekeepers think we should be seeing. On the flipside, these gatekeepers are tasked with providing the information they deem most relevant to our daily content consumption (and search) needs. By not employing such filtering, they could be said to be adding more noise. It’s a complex issue, on which opinions vary. It’s convenience vs. information overload.
What do you think? Should Google, Facebook and others be filtering results based on who we are? Share your thoughts.
