This is an attempt to rationalize away people's concerns without having to address them. People really do have concerns, and if they are not precisely what is being articulated and the words don't precisely match the actions, that is not proof they don't exist. It merely means that people are not successfully articulating them. It would be better to try to figure out what they actually are than to take the psychologically appealing route of explaining them away in your own Google-centric worldview, then thinking you've actually addressed anything.
Edit: For posterity I'll leave up "Google-centric", but thanks mdwrigh2; please consider it struck. I still think there's an attempt to dodge around what the concerns actually are.
Just to make sure its clear, the author of this runs a media company and is not a Googler. I'm not sure he benefits at all by rationalizing away "people's concerns without having to address them".
Erm, if ever, here is a real candidate for the correlation != causation lesson.
I think it would be doing a massive disservice to Google to say that the only reason people use their service is because of personalized search results. Google do have good search results (in my subjective opinion, at least) - but that is not why I used them (I now use DDG).
Google had the cleanest and simplest UI, non-intrusive adverts, and generally didn't "get in the way".
I'm now using DDG because Google has lost these qualities - I reached a point where I found myself fighting with Google's UI "improvements" more and more. Now I'm thankfully back to the point where search is just search again, and I don't mind some adverts on the side - there's no such thing as a free service.
People don't hate personalized search, they hate not knowing what's going to happen with the information.
Personally, I love how convenient it is for Google to know as much as it does about me. But I then have to begrudgingly trust that they "won't be evil" with that information. It's a tradeoff, and I like to think that most people understand it as such.
I'm a person, and I hate personalized search exactly because of what personalized search is. I don't want to live in a filter bubble. If I search for my name, I obviously want to know what other people would see about me. The same goes for any kind of ego-searching (my software projects, for example) If I search for "where to buy x", I want to see where Google thinks it is best to buy x, regardless of the fact that I am in Norway. Regardless of who I have in my G+ circles. If I want to narrow the search, I can do it myself. Even when I search for "mono", I want to be reminded that the world largely thinks mono means mononucleosis, not the mono compiler and runtime. I am part of the world, dammit, and I don't want Google to go out of their way to avoid showing me that world.
I also hate Google's hoarding of information about me, but this hate is completely orthogonal.
That's what it's about. Just a counter example to a sweeping statement.
Although, now it seems that "personalized search" might mean different things to different people; I'm not only talking about Search Plus Your World. I've had to go to extra trouble to get google to show me results not tweaked for Norway. I mean -- I still get to hate it if it is optional, as long as it is bothering me, don't I? :)
As a matter of fact this causes google.com to take me to google.no, contrary to what my settings say (that are active when I'm not in an incognito window). This is also independent of what my browser language preferences are.
I'm not exactly sure if this poisons my search results or not, and I am too tired to look into it right now. But it still makes me worry that I'm seeing skewed search results.
Additionally, it is of couse extra work to open an incognito window for every search, so this still means Google's attempt at tailoring the results for me causes me bother.
I'm personally a fan of personalized search, oftentimes it feels like Google is reading my mind. Which also is what I assume they're aspiring to. However there are times when I need more generalized results and an incognito search seems to do just that, but I'm not surprised if there is some kind of filtering going on even then though.
Exactly. I already know that Google utterly fails at "autocorrecting" my search terms, because invariably the autocorrect note at the top just means I need to add more "quotes" to force the search I wanted in the first place. Given that, I don't have much confidence in personalized search results either.
Beyond that, I also find value in knowing how the results and rankings look in general, and that value goes away if the results and rankings become specific to me.
Google actually often succeeds in giving me good alternative suggestions but when it fails to even consider a search for a programming keyword, automatically only searching for a common search term, it is so infuriating that their successes are forgotten.
I do hate personalized search. When I search the internet, I'm usually looking for things I'm not already familiar with. Having my search results overwhelmed with stuff that I already know where to find is very frustrating.
These days, I usually find myself spending most of my time in incognito mode, so that I can access the internet and not my own personal bubble.
I don't think most people actually care about what's going to happen with information (not even personal details, with a big exception being their credit card number) at all...
I recently found a package of sunflower seeds in my cupboard that had MSG in it. MSG is absolutely delicious, a magical powder that can turn the blandest food into a flavorparty.
But as a rule, I avoid it whenever I can because it is essentially a slow acting poison. When I purchased those sunflower seeds, I did not understand what they were made from. Had I known, I would not have become a user of that company's sunflower seeds.
I loved those sunflower seeds, but I most certainly did not love what they were made from. And I would have rejected them had I known at the start, despite their delicious flavor.
Applying the moral of this story to the topic at hand is left as an exercise for the reader...
On a side note... MSG has never been proved to be harmful, even after more than 40 years of tests. It is consumed daily by about a third of the world's population, and occurs naturally by combining certain foods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami). The Western aversion to MSG is irrational, and misses on a potential alternative to table salt (which is actually more harmful).
Apologies for being OT!
I think people just hate the idea of change. Look at the Facebook UI redesigns. Every time they do a major change, people freak out and scream bloody murder for about 3 or 4 days, even if the new design is better than the old.
Something similar is happening for Google with both this and their ToS changes. They're largely improvements, but many people hate the thought of partially relearning or adapting to a new or changed system.
I generally think moving people from old to new is best, even if they cry about it. The trick is to ignore the ones complaining for the sake of complaining while addressing legitimate grievances.
"Old" and "new" don't describe intrinsic qualities, they're just indicators of what sequence things arrived in, which is something wholly orthogonal to the value or utility of the things in question.
Yes, people may often be uncomfortable with change per se - but if it's fallacious to presume that change is always bad, it's equally fallacious to presume that newer is always better.
Much of the criticism of Google's recent changes describes valid objections to the nature of Google as a tool in its present state, not just complaints that it's different from what they're used to.
Fallacy alert: Just because people love Google search doesn't mean they love it because it is highly personalized. In the absence of better data, one could just as easily substitute "despite" for "because" in that sentence. The author's argument is analogous to saying that China's stance on civil rights is perfectly OK because everyone buys electronics made in China.
I'm rarely logged into Google, and I send the DNT header. This results in very little personalization of my search results, if at all. And I still prefer Google's search results to anything served up by Bing or DDG.
Yes. I looked through the comments on the article and the comments here waiting for someone to point out what the article should have addressed. That correlation isn't causation is so basic I'm still not sure I didn't maybe miss something in the main text.
He talks like the statistics from 2004 have anything to do with the latest social search changes. There have been a lot of complaints and a lot of fuzz about the new privacy policy and the latest updates to personalised search, but do people really want it? I certainly don't, every time I've had a social result from Google+ come up, it was something useless.
Today I was looking up how to set a field to unsigned integer in mysql (result: you can't), and a post of mine where I mentioned MySQL pops up. Well thank you so much, what I already knew is what I was NOT looking for. I'll use Google+'s search if I want to find a post on Google+.
Also I may be the exception, but ever since I tried DuckDuckGo I liked it more and more. This is mostly thanks to that it's the default search engine in Linux Mint (I figured I should, as a good software developer, get some experience with Linux--probably going to switch to another distribution soon though), but since today I also have "d keyword" bound to duckduckgo search in Firefox on my laptop and at internship. It just works great for most things I search for.
Social search... yeah many things have been said about it, but a classic example is the restaurant. Wouldn't you want to get restaurants near you, rather than one in Iran (let's pretend that is a top ranking one)?
Well, no, absolutely not. If I want a restaurant nearby, I'll open up Google Maps on my phone, zoom to the range I want to search within, and search for 'restaurant'. Or if I can't do that, I'll simply Google for 'restaurant city-name'.
This localization is also rendered useless when you want to find a restaurant to take your girlfriend to and you are not whereever you would like to take her.
Oh and don't forget that Google can't really find the location of most desktop computers, it will only work on laptops and mobile devices when they share their location.
The only possible benefit I can see from this is that you don't have to type the city name when you mean the city you're currently at. Still though, I'd like it better if Google suggested "Did you mean: restaurant [current city]" instead of assuming that's what you meant.
I'd like to see how many people prefer Google's search now against how many prefered it 6 months ago. That's about the timeframe they really started releasing more social products.
He says "what do you think?" and I think he is incredibly bad and interpreting data. Google has been a juggernaught for years. The fact that they both have a lot of users that like them and that people don't want these kinds of results that they have started to do recently are not mutually exclusive concepts.
One of these days I hope and pray Google's personalized search will be smart enough to stop 'correcting' my spelling to something I wasn't actually looking for.
If I actually do spell something wrong, I'll realize it and happily fix it.
I actually like personalized search, except when I'm searching for anything remotely non-technical. Ubuntu Forums are the top result when I search for flu symptoms.
Heh, Google really is making a big mistake here. People search for weird shit on Google and don't want anyone else finding out. I mean all it takes is a few people accidentally 1+'ing a "weird" page, their friends ridiculing them, and the person whining on the internet.
Seriously, all the search people are screwing this up. Once Bing integrates with Facebook as well, people are going to start freaking out. Nobody cares if advertisers track them looking at stupid shit. It's only when parents/coworkers/friends see that stuff when it matters.
"Personal" social search is a fake problem domain. The real one is creating anonymous searching, and grouping people into anonymous artificial circles.
"Here is what other people looking at anal beads liked" is what we need, not "Mom, Dad liked this (Anal Beads) search". I know this may be factually wrong, but it doesn't matter. People are going to start thinking it does/will happen. Fear propagates faster than facts. Once people start getting privacy phobic they WILL lash out. It just hasn't reached the tipping point.
It's sad when Moot knows more about the fate of the internet than the people putting the $$$ into it.
Google has done several forms of personalization before "search plus your world":
- Google detects your location (using GeoIP and similar) and personalizes results that way, both by redirecting you to google.$countrycode and by providing location-specific search (such as map results). You can't turn off the location-specific results, you can only make them more vague (by setting your location as a country rather than a city).
- Google detects if your IP address comes from a .edu; among other things, visiting google.com from a .edu will produce a message at the bottom of the homepage saying "Graduating? Come work with us!"
- Unless you turn it off, Google personalizes search results based on what you've previously searched for and clicked on.
Personally, I think this article has done nothing more than mistake correlation for causation, by saying that because Google keeps adding more personalization and Google's usage keeps growing, that therefore people must like personalization despite people saying they don't want it. I'd suggest instead that people dislike personalization just as they say they do, but that people either don't hate it enough to switch, or don't feel they have a credible alternative to switch to.
Yep, your last paragraph is what I've been feeling.
I've anecdotally seen much different results from Google since Google + Your World... searching for technical documentation has become gross -- the same queries for myself and coworkers will return different results.
But where is there to go? Duck Duck Go seems OK but I don't feel as comfortable using their UI as I do Google's. Probably just an issue of familiarity.
Edit: For posterity I'll leave up "Google-centric", but thanks mdwrigh2; please consider it struck. I still think there's an attempt to dodge around what the concerns actually are.