I noticed a while ago that a collegue and I got different results when we googled for our company name, but I didn't know that it's now happening in such an extent.
I've set it as default on Chrome. Maybe google is better - I'll get more python libraries and less news stories about sheep (or Darwin laureates) getting swallowed by pythons, but I can live with that. Besides, I'm pretty good at typing "google" if I need it.
It's not happening to any extent, it's just a new FUD concept that is meant to sell books an confuse people, if you seek more info you can dig deeper into any set of initial results. Personalization == relevance.
This assumes that 'filter bubble' is something more than a nonsense term.
There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results.
How would you go about ranking then? alphabetically?! it's a matter of tuning the relevance 'dials' and it's all in early stages so a solution to this imaginary problems is more research and not to create bullshit terminology in order to sell some books.
Most people don't realize that Google and other companies are doing this. That's my main problem. It's not about selling books in my mind as much as it about communicating why something is in a search list for person A vs. person B. I don't want my Internet censored.
People don't realize many things about search engine from indices to ranking algorithms, they do realize however that a search engine is to return the most relevant results for them and that is were personalization/relevance fits in.
There is a major difference between personalization and "pure" relevance, at least as used here. However, it is more of a question of inputs than actual terms.
"Pure" relevance is solely a function of the query and the document - R(q,d).
Personalization involves the user and possibly the context - R(q,d,u,x). Now, if you consider the user and their context to be part of the query, then yes, it's the same thing as relevance.
So the real question: should the user's identity/history/profile and/or current context be considered a part of the relevance function or not? DDG says no, Google says yes.
Thinking of it in this way makes the real question clearer. Unfortunately, it will probably make little sense to most Real Users.
Long time DDG user here. I highly encourage people to try and make the switch. I often find DDG gives me the needed information without having to actually having to visit the site. I still find myself going to Google sometimes if DDG doesn't give me what I want, but it's smart enough to get me the most relevant information faster most of the time. Often enough that I don't feel the need to switch back.
In making the switch, I highly advise you to spend a little bit of time learning the keyboard shortcuts, especially the !Bang feature (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html). You'll love the HN search options. =) There are so many, you won't be able to learn them all.
You can also still use Google if you want, or even Bing (or other engines). Basically, the !Bang syntax would mean even if you aren't using DDG, it enables you to quickly use whatever engine you really want.
I'm just a fan of DDG. Hope you find it as useful as I do. =)
I'm glad I have been using DDG for over 6 months now. For the new user, here are some advices.
DDG is my default search engine. Basically, all of my searches are completed in DDG, only very few times I have to go to google to find what I am looking for. My suggestion is that you spend 5 minutes learning the bang! syntax, as it speeds up your search by alot, then set DDG as your default search engine for a couple weeks. You will see that the bang! syntax and the 0-click-info really makes the difference on search speed, and their results are pretty damn good.
Also a long time DDG user. I have it set as my default search provider in chrome, and it has sped up my browsing considerably. Shortcuts like "!w some article" or "!a some product" (takes you directly to Wikipedia or Amazon, respectively) are very handy. The only times I've had to revert to Google are for very specific forum trawling.
The first example is totally borked. They first search for "climate change" (notice the ") and then search for climate change (without quotes). Of course the search engine shows different results for different queries.
Yeah this is an important issue. Google apparently ranks results (for you personally) based on some 57 inputs, even when not logged into Google services. In short results suffer from a self-reinforcing feedback loop, forever constraining what you see.
I wonder how easy it is to get "clean" or "default" results from Google?
And I know it's been discussed many times , but just how easy would it be to maintain real anonymity across the web?
Incognito/private browsing + going through DuckDuckGo (even for Google queries, with !g prefix) works for me. (Edit to add since I can't reply: going through DDG avoids Google redirecting to country-specific variation).
Whit, what? Doesn't going through DDG with !g not just redirect to google, where your normal filter will be applied (private browsing notwithstanding)...
Somewhere, I think even on HN, I was taught about google.com/ncr - which should solve that problem (being in Country A and arriving on the localized, unreadable landing page) once and for all.
That said: I've DDG as my homepage and I'm a happy user.
No it's a non-issue, and by the way Google probably uses much more that 57 'inputs' (signals) to determine relevance. Personalization is just a different term for relevant results and this is just FUD, the source of which is people who don't understand the technical aspects.
I'm gonna humbly disagree. There are many potential ranking factors in a search result: how well the query matches the document text, how important that text is in the document, how important the document is (PR) and so on. What I don't necessarily want is further ordering by what a machine thinks is my political inclination or world view.
Read my last paragraph carefully; I'm just pointing out the name doesn't matter, it's a real phenomena that doesn't go away by changing the name.
My personal stance is actually a great deal more nuanced, which is that you can't not be in a bubble. It is mathematically impossible. Any way of slicing the torrent of information coming at you constitutes a bias. The entire idea of "piercing the bubble" is an instance of English misleading you, it's a concept without a referent. The question is not how to "escape" the bubble, the question is how do we choose our bubble?
So filtering/personalization is always present; we entirely agree on that point. Is it excessive, though? If it's not excessive, then, almost by definition[1], it's not a problem - or at least is not a major one. There is actually a huge difference between "personalization" and "excessive personalization", which was what I was trying to get at.
(Also, paragraph != sentence)
[1] Excessive meaning "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable".
A paragraph may legally consist of one sentence. It may legally consist of one word in some cases.
You seem to be trying to draw me into defending a point I'm not making. I'm making a much more subtle one, which is that you can't escape being in a bubble (not the bubble, which I initially typed, because there isn't the bubble, there's all kinds of them), so in a way arguing about whether it's "excessive" isn't even the right dimension to argue on; the filter bubbles simply are. (Not "simply ar excessive", simply are; they simply exists regardless of whether they are excessive or desirable or anything else.) The question is, what should be done about that fact, rather than how do we prevent that fact from being true, and to be honest I'm rather ambivalent about the answer to that question, because the answer is dominated more by your preconceptions and pre-existing goals than anything interesting.
I would agree with you if there was a button I could click to turn it off. Their algorithms aren't infallible by any means. Plus, ultimately they are a business and trying to sell, so they are going to eventually skew results towards things they think I may be willing to buy, rather than things I want to know. I think G is more susceptible than MS, but only because MS does make a living selling other stuff.
I'm not saying it's evil or wrong, just that if my first results don't appeal to me, a simple measure that might work for me would be to turn the filter off. Anyway, they could learn more about me if they let me do that.
Great! Put a button on the search page. Will "pws=0" allow the engine to "learn" from my corrections? I'm pretty sure incognito won't. But allowing me to "correct" the personalization might be useful to you.
Personalization can, however, fail. I have a German IP address which causes Google to show me predominantly German search results. That’s not what I want at all most of the time.
There are ways to sort of get around that but they are cumbersome and they don’t always work right.
Google is pretty good at figuring out what to show you depending on the language of the search terms you are using. When there are German words in my search query Google will show me predominantly German results. That’s to be expected, that’s what I want. The problem is that Google seems to use my location (IP address, maybe also the language of the interface and whether I’m using google.de or google.com) and override that behavior so that even if I’m using english words in my query it will nevertheless show me predominantly German results.
If you are using firefox, right click into the input field and select add keyword search, and add a keyword. Now you can easily search via scroogle entering the keyword and then the searchterms in the address bar.
Thank you, I don't find this site that useful but I was really perplexed at its home page, it looks like it was designed by someone suffering from schizophrenia.
We often forget that, although it's obvious search engines filter results, the information we see on social sites is also filtered.
Consider users of Reddit. Now most of them would consider themselves very open minded and enlightened, yet their is active discouragement for radical ideas without due consideration as to their merits. It's just easier to downvote and look at Mario cake.
Overall, I think in a way we NEED filters to remove the faff, but be careful to keep a social circle which encourages radical ideas to be bought out into the light of logic and due consideration,
I've been using DDG exclusively for a little while. Half the time the results are identical to Google. The other half is usually a collection of links from sites I would have searched on to research the topic.
In all seriousness, this is actually my main use case for the private browsing mode in chrome: to search google without the filter bubble(1)
It's quite shocking to see just how much those results differ from the ones I'm usually served, actually.
I know it's actually supposed to be 'awesome' to have every search tailored to _you_, but it just makes me feel uncomfortable that I'm not seeing the internet "the way it's supposed to be seen" - if that makes any sense.
(1): Or at least a smaller bubble, considering it still knows my location - even though i use google.com, my os, my browser, etc...
I heard about this book on NPR a couple of weeks ago [1]. I really don't like this biased view of ML.
In summary what he said on the show was something like: At least the news shows (and news pappers, radio) gives the same information to everyone, so instead of showing Kardashians news they do show you Bin Laden news, even though, they know the Kardashians are more profitable... this is not the case with Google Search or Netflix, Yahoo, Bing, etc (all attacked by this author).
I think that ML helps more than it hurts and viewing it in a non-technical way is wrong, the author gives the impression that Google (the company and their execs) manually (via algorithms, but very manageable in his opinion) change the search results to not show things that they don't like, then it raises the question "do we really trust one company?".
Its arguable that the search results in Google or Netflix are optimized for profits, but how do you make profits in the customer industry? IMHO you do that by making their happier, showing useful results, for them, not for everyone.
I'm waiting for the time when I google: "what channel and time is Conan on" [2] and I get "channel 43 11pm" as the result. Of course that is very personalized, and the result will be just for me... but again I'm the one searching and I'm the one needing the results.
Exactly! it's just nonsense peddled by those who don't understand the technical aspects of search, people who don't realize that a search engine's prime function is to filter the millions of results for each query to down to the most relevant results for the users, and not the same 10 results are relevant to each and every user.
And user regardless of nay personalization can dig through any initial results.
It's just annoying an ignorant bullshit being disguised as a real issue.
I think there's reason to complain that the reality is far from the ideal. Take Netflix, for example. I rated hundreds of movies, filled out the taste preferences to narrow down the genres I was most interested in, but the "Suggestions for You" were underwhelming, to say the least. Even worse, they simply never changed. So I went back into my taste preferences and checked that I "Often" watched every single mood and genre listed. Now I get a vastly improved range of suggestions, exposing me to some great movies, simply because Netflix is no longer hiding them from my view. I may have a unique individual taste for movies, but Netflix sure hasn't fathomed my criteria with their algorithm.
Of course, I might want my search results to be filtered. To take but one example: Neither FOX nor CNN are providing any valuable insights at all, so filtering them out is a good idea for me.
Or, to get all pithy about it, the problem is not the filter bubble, it's the crap bubble.
If there's a problem with relevance sorting at all, it's the issue that it is based on history, not intent.
I think this is a real issue, and I am glad that DDG is addressing it. This is a more-compelling take on the tracking issue IMO.
What I'd really like to see, is a search engine to allow me to do both. I'd like to have a profile (that didn't use my name), and when I wanted to, I could click a result as 'useful'. This would go into my personal algorithm. I could then toggle between filtered search, or unfiltered search, whenever I like.
It might even be useful to build search filter categories. But I'd keep that a bit buried for the power users.
Unless I'm mistaken, Incognito mode simply disables local history recording, and has not much (if at all) to do with search results or the ability for Google to track your movements.
Incognito mode isn't just disabled history recording. It does not use any of your cookies from main session, and it deletes the cookies when it is closed. It also isolates your extensions from running incognito unless you elect for them to be.
I just had to explain this to my co-founder last night after he freaked out because our old site with a different name was showing up first in his search results with our new name as the query . With web history off the old site wasn't even on the first page.Now I just have to explain that no one searches for early-stage startups let alone cares if they change their names :)
Confirmation bias is bad enough already, it's really a shame that powerful companies like Google reinforces it just for the sake of giving you more pleasing search results. (Pleasing and Good overlap, but they're not equal.)
Edit: I didn't intend to bash Google specifically. But they are faced with a choice in which their own interest conflict with those of their users. And as Capitalist Bastards are more and more accepted in our society, we don't blame them for the selfish choice. Maybe not a shame then, but at the very least a pity.
My phrasing was a bit harsh. I understand that Google (and others) are mainly out to make money. To do that they have to please users most. Anyway, they probably can't make the difference between "relevant" and "pleasant", because user's behaviour only grant them access to "pleasant".
As long as this is done in a neutral way (by delivering the same result to everyone), any confirmation bias will be averaged across entire populations, so this should be okay.
Personalized results however make the results noticeably more pleasant, and significantly more biased (this is probably unavoidable). Of course Google, Bing, and Co would shun that bias thing. Who can blame them?
I don't want blame Google specifically. I want to point out this old, common moral dilemma: make money, or don't hurt anyone? Google took the money. Many do. I'm not sure to what extent we should blame them, but clearly, the System™ has room for improvement.
I cannot see a problem here. Who exactly is being hurt by the "filter bubble"?
The end user is fine - they are more likely to see results they are actually interested in. If a user doesn't trust a source and won't click on their links, they'll soon not have to bother scrolling past them.
The sites themselves actually benefit as well. Sure, they may be bumped from the first page of results for users that are unlikely to visit their site, anyway, but the tradeoff is that they get a higher position for the users who may actually visit their site. It's an ideal trade for those being filtered.
I suppose that leaves the idea that the end result is a "biased" internet. I don't buy it. Google is not removing sites that disagree with them, they are re-ordering them for different users. If your profile wasn't factored in, then what options do they have?
They could order on popularity, but biasing towards popular opinion isn't any better than biasing towards my opinion.
They could randomize the order, this would be without bias, but absolutely useless to anyone.
They could judge the objective truth of sites, but that's far more biased than any of the other options.
The end user is not fine. He is more likely to see results that he actually agree with. See, the original confirmation bias will cause you to seek opinions you agree with more often than others. The search engine will then conclude that you are more interested in the kind of sources those opinions come from. That would be true, by the way, but then comes a point when a quick glance at your search engine result will show you more of what you agree with, and less of what you disagree with.
Now go use that as an estimation of popularity and veracity. I bet many people do, without knowing the result is strongly biased by their own prior behaviour.
Search engine, as the sole entry point of the web, do bias it. Page Rank for instance, could trigger a feedback loop: if a site is more prominent in searches, it will get more links. That will get them more search prominence, and feedback and foom.
Now is the popular bias better than the personal bias? I think it is. One would at least get to be exposed to other's opinions, instead of just his own.
If you just care about the economy of the web, in the sense of selling, advertising, promoting, buying… then of course the personal bias is currently best. That's the most efficient way to milk the tear$ out of eyeballs. The easiest way to reward the brains behind those eyeballs. When it's all about money, there is absolutely no problem with the method. But I have other values besides money. A very important one is respecting curiosity and search for truth. The personal bias doesn't.
This sort of personalization is no different than using a user's click history to determine whether he means cycling or motorcycling when he searches for "biking". It's no different than using history to determine whether someone is looking for a television schedule or coding help when he searches for "programming".
One person's "confirmation bias" is another person's "relevance". Increasing relevance to the user will naturally result in confirming their biases, because there's (probably) no programmatic way to discern contentious subjects in which confirmation bias is applicable from non-contentious subjects where it's not.
The only "shame" I see here is people who ascribe some sort of devious intention to what's clearly the natural result of trying to solve the most important problem in search.
DDG is quite good in regular search. I like their commitment to privacy and so switched my default search engine to DDG. But I noticed more and more that I use google maps almost as much search. I search for places and directions on maps end up going to google a lot. That is brilliance of Google. They built search verticals and so its tough to not use them. If only DDG could do something about that.
Problem with OSM is that it's nowhere near as complete as Google Maps, and I don't see it growing the way Wikipedia did (contributing to Wikipedia is much easier than contributing to OSM)
I understand the quest for a larger userbase but please don't use this sort of FUD that is being peddled by those who don't understand the technical aspects of search and are trying to sell their books.
A search engine's prime function is to filter the millions of results for each query down to the most relevant results for each individual user, and never the same 10 results are relevant to each and every user.
There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results.
How would you go about ranking then? alphabetically?! it's a matter of tuning the relevance 'dials' and it's all in early stages so a solution to this imaginary problem is more research and not to hide behind bullshit terminology.
And as a bonus a user (regardless of any personalization) can dig through any initial set of results if she seeks more information.
So please don’t buy into this misleading and ignorant bullshit that is being disguised as a real issue.
It's not an issue just because you want to believe it is.
Media outlets always filtered stuff for you but now the algorithms are 'filtering' results according to your interaction to find what's relevant to you, so you have a 'vote' here.
You also can dig through any initial results (click the news vertical to find more news for example) you couldn't do that with the media of yore.
Why do you think it is an issue? I think everyone already filters intuitively. It's called having a "bullshit filter". I believe it makes not much difference whether it's automated or everyone does it manually.
I think the chance that I would click on a bullshit source like Fox News is very low because I don't trust them. Even if Google brought it up as the first result.
My point is that people already only click on search results that they agree with. Nobody wants to see stuff that they disagree with. That is human nature.
So living in a filter bubble already happens without automatic filters. It happens in our brains and we call it personality.
I expect my search to be faithful to the terms I enter. If the results aren't satisfactory, I'll narrow the search with additional terms. Withholding information based on some guess at my political leanings is dishonest. I'd be appalled if a librarian did it; why should I expect less from a search engine?
The 'political leaning results' are just a tool the author used to try to explained his (ill-informed) point, there are no evidence to any such degree of personalization specially not to any 'bubble' inducing extent, it's all very sensationalistic.
And for the record the political example was about facebook wall.
What does faithful mean? You want German or Chinese results? You want global or local results (in your language of choice). There is always personalization in search.
If you went to a librarian and said "show me Egypt", she would have nowhere to start. A conversation would then ensue about what you are interested in.
Keep going to the library, keep having those conversations, and eventually, the librarian will take you straight to the books you want when you ask for Norway. If you want something different, you'll have to explicitly ask.
What Google is doing is no different. It just happens to have a lot more conversations with you.
What Google is doing is no different only if you can, in your ensuing "conversations," correct a misinterpretation that may have happened somewhere along the way. If your ability to do that is hampered because the only way to do it is by clicking on something, you don't see the thing to click on which will do this, then the filtering is not helping (and actually works against Google's and my mutual interests).
Not sure where you are going with your dichotomy- if you are unable to correct in either case (because you don't get the option of clicking on a correct answer) then it fails. I suppose with enough perseverance you could trick the search engine into showing you what you want- if you know it exists in the first place- but then, (1) just enter the very specific term to start with, and (2) this defeats the attempts to become more relevant.
I agree with you that these seem to be small changes. So far.
That's a good point, but I think it kind of misses the forest for the trees. It's true that personalization might sometimes lead Google to mistakenly show you less relevant results, but it seems pretty certain that the opposite would also be true — a generic page will sometimes show less relevant results than a personalized one. One search result is going to be shown ahead of another either way. If showing a less relevant result ahead of a more relevant one is considered "hampering," I don't see any reason this "hampering" is unique to personalized search.
I think it would come down to a matter of degree. A slight change in the order of results is pretty meaningless either way. But major alterations, where some pages are relatively inaccessible, could obviously be an impediment to getting the results we want.
Let me try this example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But one day you are writing a blog in which you want to search for background, but you need to use a non-scientific meaning of the same word. Perhaps a psychic used the term and you are debunking. The particular case is irrelevant. The point is tha if personalization is too aggressive you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.
This isn't privacy FUD or anything, just a pragmatic warning. The FUD comes when you start thinking about how their algorithms might actually decide which results you are "interested" in. Thinking of Google, what bu siness are they in? What about you behavior on the web most interests them? Would they decide that the most interesting things to you are the ones on which you clicked the most ads?
But whatever change personalized search makes relative to generic search, the opposite change will occur going from personalized to generic. To penalize personalized search when the change is of equal magnitude going either direction doesn't seem fair. As long as the personalizations are just a transformation and not a subtraction, the two options are just mirror images of each other. They have the exact same kind of failure condition. The question is just which one's failure conditions are more likely to occur.
As a counter-example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But most people aren't looking for scientific info, so you constantly have to dig and dig to find anything relevant on Google. The point is, if the search technology is too impersonal, you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.
As long as the personalizations are just a transformation and not a subtraction
This is the crucial point. As long as it's accessible, I can get what I want by search refinement either way (but I would imagine that it would be easier for me to refine in the space in which I am familiar than to refine in the unfamiliar space). Giving me the (easy) option to turn it off is a good idea for search.
The article makes the assumption that personalized search results are bad for you, then goes on exemplifying it, but does not say or demonstrate in any way why personalized search results are bad, especially since it doesn't give any context about the person making those queries.
Search ranking is a matter of context. "Egypt" does not mean anything, other than the name of a country, and different people mean different things. When you're searching for "Egypt" and want to get travel tips, if you don't get them you can always expand your query to "Egypt travelling tips". But even that is a pretty shallow request and you can further expand it like "Egypt travel guide to the pyramids".
The search engine's job is to find what I'm looking for. And IMHO the current state of the art is a little behind my expectations - I would have expected these personalized results to be far more effective than they are by now.
It's true that sometimes I'm looking for specific things, but other times I'm searching to get an idea of "what's out there", to fill gaps in my knowledge and make sure I'm appraised of what's going on in the world. It'd be nice to at least have some control over what kinds of searches I'm doing. For example, if I search for my own name, what I want to know is something like: what are the most common search results other people get when they search for my name. The same is usually true if I'm doing "related work" type searching for research; I explicitly want to find stuff outside my immediate area of specialization, in order to make sure I'm not missing anything that other people would've expected me to cover.
I understand that, but if the search results are not personalized for you, then they must be personalized for the common denominator, as in the hive, the majority's opinion, the status quo.
For general search queries, the long tail goes out the window anyway, and I haven't done or seen any quality metrics for DDG, but I doubt their search results are better for exploration or getting opinions different from your own.
I agree. I think people will surround themselves with a filter bubble with or without personalized search results. Ever tried to convince an avid Fox or CNN reader to read the opposing view's site?
From my personal experience, people rarely search for something as simple as "Egypt," and instead, search for "Egypt travelling tips" like your example.
If your Google-fu is strong, you'll write a query that targets your desired results much better than a generic shot-in-the-dark query.
That agrees with what I said. Unless you don't think that much growth in searches over such a short period is significant.
It's even more significant when you look at where it was a year ago. 1.2 million in April 2010, 5.9 million in April 2011, 6.3 last month, and already 3.8 a little over halfway through this month. This is significant when you consider the lack of marketing and that DDG is run by one person.
It's not significant. In the world of search engines, you need to be the #1 or #2 player to earn major revenue. People aren't gonna wanna waste any time/energy advertising on your platform if you're getting just a handful of searches per month for say... mp3 players or cellphones. DDG is just betting on an acquisition, but it's just a wrapper around the Yahoo BOSS API.
Nothing starts at #1. Expecting DDG to displace an oligopoly built over a decade and a half in a year or two of existence is asking too much of anyone.
Search queries have different purposes. Personalization based on my preferences and past search works wonders for known-item seeking and for re-finding.
But for exploratory search and exhaustive search personalization works as an echo chamber (or filter bubble if you will) .
Then there is the problem of change and inertia. People change, their preferences vary in time. Personalization has an inertia that causes the recommendation engine to always be behind the actual preferences. It's more visible the better the recommendation engine.
I'm not saying personalization is problematic. There are problems with using it all the time and stealthily, without a clear possibility to turn it off.
All can be remedied by tweaking the algorithms and that happens all the time, you can also use a certain vertical directly for certain type queries (scholar search etc).
The same way that what a user might enjoy can be inferred the inverse of that can be used as a signal in the algorithm as well. Personalization is just relevance and all is just a matter of tuning.
I agree, it can be remedied by better algorithms - such that can recognize when I'm doing a search for a known item and when I'm performing exploratory search. In the first case, personalize away, in the second case, please show me everything.
The challenge is that people switch very quickly between these search modes and don't even think about it.
I think you missed the point. Yes DDG ranks, but it may rank differently. Of course, there is an implicit slam on them here: instead of showing you what you want the vast majority of the time, they show you other stuff. This is good on occasion (so you don't live in an echo chamber), but if this was all the time it would mean lower quality search results for simple things.
My own standing is that most of the time you need what you have to have to complete task at hand. Then you could go at YouTube and refresh "Recomendations" to your heart content.
The other way around is to wreak havoc to important parts of your life.
This is exactly why I stopped using DDG as my main search engine. My workflow was often like this:
- Search for term on DDG
- Look at results, find nothing
- Try to find better term
- Give up and use original term in Google
- Find result
I tried to use DDG exclusively two time (once 8 months ago, once ~4 months ago), but the result was the same. I don't know how much personalization affects this, but Google just gives me the best results.
"There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results."
Even if you're a Sailor Moon fan, you might actually be looking for information about the rock rotating around this planet when searching for "moon". In the same vein I might be a liberal but be looking for a multitude of opposing views and ideas when googling "core values of NRA members".
Oh btw, we engineers, our algorithms, aren't smart enough to foretell people's inclinations based on their past habits, we also can't read minds. The increasing use of personalization as a factor for relevancy will, imho, lead to user dissatisfaction, precisely because they make shoddy assumptions.
Believe it or not, but some people also want to be surprised and learn new things. YES. We exist!
Maybe we don't want a filter that sucks, plain and simple? Whether the filter sucks or not is completely subjective, but it sucks for me, so there.
Changing the language not that intuitive in Google, it's a drag. I have to do it all the time when I clean my cookies, and sometimes I still get crappy "pt.wikipedia.org" results on top instead of "en.wikipedia.org" just because my browser isn't in english and I don't want to change it just because of Google.
I might want to type www.google.it and search for Berlusconi news in Italia, but it won't let me, because it just show me brazilian news. So yeah, I can't even get to another bubble.
Also, apparently Google filters by IP, since searching via Tor or a VPS renders very different results. I dislike this for personal reasons because it breaks the internet for me.
Also, I might not like the fact that Google collects stuff about my search habits, which is also a valid concern.
So, there, it's an issue for me. Might be an edge case, might be an exception, but I think that I deserve to know why this happens and the alternatives.
"There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results. How would you go about ranking then? alphabetically?!"
Oh, you know, maybe using Google's much vaunted "PageRank" algorithm, which is supposed to take in to account things such as links on other pages back to the page being considered for inclusion in the search results.. the more such links there are, the better the rank is supposed to be.
The above description is obviously an oversimplification, and I don't have access to Google's PageRank algorithm anyway, so couldn't tell you what it actually was if I wanted to, but it's something along those lines, and need not take in to account your previous search history in any way or "personalize" the search for you.
From the search engine revenue perspective, how much can be the loss in case they provide a preference option to show "generic results" (like "safe search option off") - with an easy to switch ui between the two?
Normally we don't like to crowd up our preferences page with a bunch of options that people don't use much, but you can turn off personalization by adding "&pws=0" to the end of the Google search url.
It is well known that people seek out information that reinforces their own beliefs. And while it may not be ideal for an enlightened population, why should Google/Bing fight this natural inclination? Their job is to ultimately give their users what they are searching for, not challenge their users' opinions. Especially since there are tons of benefits to personalized search, and it may be hard to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This mentality ("give people what they want") results in the empty, sensationalist journalism that most people dislike. When I read the news, I don't want to be entertained, I want to be informed. The same goes for Internet searches.
Any filter at all will result in a "Filter Bubble" as defined here (except, I suppose, returning a randomly sorted list of all sites on the internet). Whether the filter is personalized or not doesn't change that fact. What is the actual benefit of everyone getting the same search results when looking for a particular term? Search engines are not news sites or research papers: biasing towards relevant results is not a bad thing.
I noticed this a long time ago. Suddenly I could ask general programming questions and it popped up results in the language I use primarily as the top results (Without me specifying it).
While some may think that this is hiding, do we not often create algorithms to asses and aide? It seems like disabling this would be against the advancement of a learning system.
I for one think its a great feature and have no desire to disable it.
What about the filter bubble of me only searching for what i am interested in? Will DDG throw in some random results in every search to save me from myself?
That's not what he asked. He asked (facetiously) about the higher-order search bubble: ie, if I only ever search for articles about Erlang innards, I'm never going to read about The Kardashians, which is relevant to a sizeable portion of contemporary American culture. To truly pop my bubble, DDG ought to throw in completely random results every now and then.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadI've added DuckDuck to my FireFox search engines.
Ditto for youtube (!yt) etc etc
There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results.
How would you go about ranking then? alphabetically?! it's a matter of tuning the relevance 'dials' and it's all in early stages so a solution to this imaginary problems is more research and not to create bullshit terminology in order to sell some books.
"Pure" relevance is solely a function of the query and the document - R(q,d).
Personalization involves the user and possibly the context - R(q,d,u,x). Now, if you consider the user and their context to be part of the query, then yes, it's the same thing as relevance.
So the real question: should the user's identity/history/profile and/or current context be considered a part of the relevance function or not? DDG says no, Google says yes.
Thinking of it in this way makes the real question clearer. Unfortunately, it will probably make little sense to most Real Users.
If you filter by what you want you don't get what you didn't know you wanted.
I will give DDG the benefit of the doubt and try it out for a couple of months.
Starting now.
In making the switch, I highly advise you to spend a little bit of time learning the keyboard shortcuts, especially the !Bang feature (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html). You'll love the HN search options. =) There are so many, you won't be able to learn them all.
You can also still use Google if you want, or even Bing (or other engines). Basically, the !Bang syntax would mean even if you aren't using DDG, it enables you to quickly use whatever engine you really want.
I'm just a fan of DDG. Hope you find it as useful as I do. =)
DDG is my default search engine. Basically, all of my searches are completed in DDG, only very few times I have to go to google to find what I am looking for. My suggestion is that you spend 5 minutes learning the bang! syntax, as it speeds up your search by alot, then set DDG as your default search engine for a couple weeks. You will see that the bang! syntax and the 0-click-info really makes the difference on search speed, and their results are pretty damn good.
Update: the quotes vs no quotes doesn't change the top results on Bing (at least for this search).
I wonder how easy it is to get "clean" or "default" results from Google?
And I know it's been discussed many times , but just how easy would it be to maintain real anonymity across the web?
Somewhere, I think even on HN, I was taught about google.com/ncr - which should solve that problem (being in Country A and arriving on the localized, unreadable landing page) once and for all.
That said: I've DDG as my homepage and I'm a happy user.
edit: speaking of bubbles :D
Fine. It's not a "filter bubble", it's "excessive personalization", and it's still bad.
Arguing about what it's called doesn't do a thing to change whether or not it exists, or whether or not it's a real problem.
My personal stance is actually a great deal more nuanced, which is that you can't not be in a bubble. It is mathematically impossible. Any way of slicing the torrent of information coming at you constitutes a bias. The entire idea of "piercing the bubble" is an instance of English misleading you, it's a concept without a referent. The question is not how to "escape" the bubble, the question is how do we choose our bubble?
(Also, paragraph != sentence)
[1] Excessive meaning "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable".
You seem to be trying to draw me into defending a point I'm not making. I'm making a much more subtle one, which is that you can't escape being in a bubble (not the bubble, which I initially typed, because there isn't the bubble, there's all kinds of them), so in a way arguing about whether it's "excessive" isn't even the right dimension to argue on; the filter bubbles simply are. (Not "simply ar excessive", simply are; they simply exists regardless of whether they are excessive or desirable or anything else.) The question is, what should be done about that fact, rather than how do we prevent that fact from being true, and to be honest I'm rather ambivalent about the answer to that question, because the answer is dominated more by your preconceptions and pre-existing goals than anything interesting.
I really should just blog this up.
I'm not saying it's evil or wrong, just that if my first results don't appeal to me, a simple measure that might work for me would be to turn the filter off. Anyway, they could learn more about me if they let me do that.
There are ways to sort of get around that but they are cumbersome and they don’t always work right.
Google is pretty good at figuring out what to show you depending on the language of the search terms you are using. When there are German words in my search query Google will show me predominantly German results. That’s to be expected, that’s what I want. The problem is that Google seems to use my location (IP address, maybe also the language of the interface and whether I’m using google.de or google.com) and override that behavior so that even if I’m using english words in my query it will nevertheless show me predominantly German results.
I don't understand that site.
If you are using firefox, right click into the input field and select add keyword search, and add a keyword. Now you can easily search via scroogle entering the keyword and then the searchterms in the address bar.
Consider users of Reddit. Now most of them would consider themselves very open minded and enlightened, yet their is active discouragement for radical ideas without due consideration as to their merits. It's just easier to downvote and look at Mario cake.
Overall, I think in a way we NEED filters to remove the faff, but be careful to keep a social circle which encourages radical ideas to be bought out into the light of logic and due consideration,
http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html#results
It's quite shocking to see just how much those results differ from the ones I'm usually served, actually.
I know it's actually supposed to be 'awesome' to have every search tailored to _you_, but it just makes me feel uncomfortable that I'm not seeing the internet "the way it's supposed to be seen" - if that makes any sense.
(1): Or at least a smaller bubble, considering it still knows my location - even though i use google.com, my os, my browser, etc...
In summary what he said on the show was something like: At least the news shows (and news pappers, radio) gives the same information to everyone, so instead of showing Kardashians news they do show you Bin Laden news, even though, they know the Kardashians are more profitable... this is not the case with Google Search or Netflix, Yahoo, Bing, etc (all attacked by this author).
I think that ML helps more than it hurts and viewing it in a non-technical way is wrong, the author gives the impression that Google (the company and their execs) manually (via algorithms, but very manageable in his opinion) change the search results to not show things that they don't like, then it raises the question "do we really trust one company?".
Its arguable that the search results in Google or Netflix are optimized for profits, but how do you make profits in the customer industry? IMHO you do that by making their happier, showing useful results, for them, not for everyone.
I'm waiting for the time when I google: "what channel and time is Conan on" [2] and I get "channel 43 11pm" as the result. Of course that is very personalized, and the result will be just for me... but again I'm the one searching and I'm the one needing the results.
[1] http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-05-17/eli-pariser-fil...
[2] At the moment I get this 1st result: http://articles.boston.com/2010-11-10/ae/29330376_1_conan-an... which is not what I searched for nor wanted...
And user regardless of nay personalization can dig through any initial results.
It's just annoying an ignorant bullshit being disguised as a real issue.
Or, to get all pithy about it, the problem is not the filter bubble, it's the crap bubble.
If there's a problem with relevance sorting at all, it's the issue that it is based on history, not intent.
What I'd really like to see, is a search engine to allow me to do both. I'd like to have a profile (that didn't use my name), and when I wanted to, I could click a result as 'useful'. This would go into my personal algorithm. I could then toggle between filtered search, or unfiltered search, whenever I like.
It might even be useful to build search filter categories. But I'd keep that a bit buried for the power users.
I suggest Chromium for the paranoid!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iw/positive_bias_look_into_the_dark/
Edit: I didn't intend to bash Google specifically. But they are faced with a choice in which their own interest conflict with those of their users. And as Capitalist Bastards are more and more accepted in our society, we don't blame them for the selfish choice. Maybe not a shame then, but at the very least a pity.
As long as this is done in a neutral way (by delivering the same result to everyone), any confirmation bias will be averaged across entire populations, so this should be okay.
Personalized results however make the results noticeably more pleasant, and significantly more biased (this is probably unavoidable). Of course Google, Bing, and Co would shun that bias thing. Who can blame them?
I don't want blame Google specifically. I want to point out this old, common moral dilemma: make money, or don't hurt anyone? Google took the money. Many do. I'm not sure to what extent we should blame them, but clearly, the System™ has room for improvement.
The end user is fine - they are more likely to see results they are actually interested in. If a user doesn't trust a source and won't click on their links, they'll soon not have to bother scrolling past them.
The sites themselves actually benefit as well. Sure, they may be bumped from the first page of results for users that are unlikely to visit their site, anyway, but the tradeoff is that they get a higher position for the users who may actually visit their site. It's an ideal trade for those being filtered.
I suppose that leaves the idea that the end result is a "biased" internet. I don't buy it. Google is not removing sites that disagree with them, they are re-ordering them for different users. If your profile wasn't factored in, then what options do they have?
They could order on popularity, but biasing towards popular opinion isn't any better than biasing towards my opinion.
They could randomize the order, this would be without bias, but absolutely useless to anyone.
They could judge the objective truth of sites, but that's far more biased than any of the other options.
Now go use that as an estimation of popularity and veracity. I bet many people do, without knowing the result is strongly biased by their own prior behaviour.
Search engine, as the sole entry point of the web, do bias it. Page Rank for instance, could trigger a feedback loop: if a site is more prominent in searches, it will get more links. That will get them more search prominence, and feedback and foom.
Now is the popular bias better than the personal bias? I think it is. One would at least get to be exposed to other's opinions, instead of just his own.
If you just care about the economy of the web, in the sense of selling, advertising, promoting, buying… then of course the personal bias is currently best. That's the most efficient way to milk the tear$ out of eyeballs. The easiest way to reward the brains behind those eyeballs. When it's all about money, there is absolutely no problem with the method. But I have other values besides money. A very important one is respecting curiosity and search for truth. The personal bias doesn't.
One person's "confirmation bias" is another person's "relevance". Increasing relevance to the user will naturally result in confirming their biases, because there's (probably) no programmatic way to discern contentious subjects in which confirmation bias is applicable from non-contentious subjects where it's not.
The only "shame" I see here is people who ascribe some sort of devious intention to what's clearly the natural result of trying to solve the most important problem in search.
I understand the quest for a larger userbase but please don't use this sort of FUD that is being peddled by those who don't understand the technical aspects of search and are trying to sell their books.
A search engine's prime function is to filter the millions of results for each query down to the most relevant results for each individual user, and never the same 10 results are relevant to each and every user.
There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results.
How would you go about ranking then? alphabetically?! it's a matter of tuning the relevance 'dials' and it's all in early stages so a solution to this imaginary problem is more research and not to hide behind bullshit terminology.
And as a bonus a user (regardless of any personalization) can dig through any initial set of results if she seeks more information.
So please don’t buy into this misleading and ignorant bullshit that is being disguised as a real issue.
At least to me.
Media outlets always filtered stuff for you but now the algorithms are 'filtering' results according to your interaction to find what's relevant to you, so you have a 'vote' here.
You also can dig through any initial results (click the news vertical to find more news for example) you couldn't do that with the media of yore.
If you want to understand where I am coming from then this is why I think it's an issue
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
I think the chance that I would click on a bullshit source like Fox News is very low because I don't trust them. Even if Google brought it up as the first result.
My point is that people already only click on search results that they agree with. Nobody wants to see stuff that they disagree with. That is human nature.
So living in a filter bubble already happens without automatic filters. It happens in our brains and we call it personality.
And for the record the political example was about facebook wall.
Keep going to the library, keep having those conversations, and eventually, the librarian will take you straight to the books you want when you ask for Norway. If you want something different, you'll have to explicitly ask.
What Google is doing is no different. It just happens to have a lot more conversations with you.
- You blatantly correct the conversation by adding additional text to the search: "norway government" versus "norway travel".
- You subtly correct the conversation over time with more government queries/clicks/likes or more travel queries/clicks/likes.
Listening to Matt Cutt's response, it sounds like all of these signals are pretty minor anyway.
I agree with you that these seem to be small changes. So far.
Let me try this example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But one day you are writing a blog in which you want to search for background, but you need to use a non-scientific meaning of the same word. Perhaps a psychic used the term and you are debunking. The particular case is irrelevant. The point is tha if personalization is too aggressive you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.
This isn't privacy FUD or anything, just a pragmatic warning. The FUD comes when you start thinking about how their algorithms might actually decide which results you are "interested" in. Thinking of Google, what bu siness are they in? What about you behavior on the web most interests them? Would they decide that the most interesting things to you are the ones on which you clicked the most ads?
As a counter-example: Suppose your searches are primarily academic. Let's say that whenever you search the term "momentum" you are looking for something scientific- ballistics, elementary particles, whatever. But most people aren't looking for scientific info, so you constantly have to dig and dig to find anything relevant on Google. The point is, if the search technology is too impersonal, you may not find the info most relevant to your interests.
This is the crucial point. As long as it's accessible, I can get what I want by search refinement either way (but I would imagine that it would be easier for me to refine in the space in which I am familiar than to refine in the unfamiliar space). Giving me the (easy) option to turn it off is a good idea for search.
The article makes the assumption that personalized search results are bad for you, then goes on exemplifying it, but does not say or demonstrate in any way why personalized search results are bad, especially since it doesn't give any context about the person making those queries.
Search ranking is a matter of context. "Egypt" does not mean anything, other than the name of a country, and different people mean different things. When you're searching for "Egypt" and want to get travel tips, if you don't get them you can always expand your query to "Egypt travelling tips". But even that is a pretty shallow request and you can further expand it like "Egypt travel guide to the pyramids".
The search engine's job is to find what I'm looking for. And IMHO the current state of the art is a little behind my expectations - I would have expected these personalized results to be far more effective than they are by now.
For general search queries, the long tail goes out the window anyway, and I haven't done or seen any quality metrics for DDG, but I doubt their search results are better for exploration or getting opinions different from your own.
From my personal experience, people rarely search for something as simple as "Egypt," and instead, search for "Egypt travelling tips" like your example.
If your Google-fu is strong, you'll write a query that targets your desired results much better than a generic shot-in-the-dark query.
DDG: If you want to grow, don't keep attacking the big search engines with FUD that only a miniscule % of people care about.
Searches per day in Feb average = 197,687
Searches per day in May average = 205,759
FUD certainly won't grow DDG out of the extreme niche it's in.
It's even more significant when you look at where it was a year ago. 1.2 million in April 2010, 5.9 million in April 2011, 6.3 last month, and already 3.8 a little over halfway through this month. This is significant when you consider the lack of marketing and that DDG is run by one person.
But for exploratory search and exhaustive search personalization works as an echo chamber (or filter bubble if you will) .
Then there is the problem of change and inertia. People change, their preferences vary in time. Personalization has an inertia that causes the recommendation engine to always be behind the actual preferences. It's more visible the better the recommendation engine.
I'm not saying personalization is problematic. There are problems with using it all the time and stealthily, without a clear possibility to turn it off.
It's not FUD, but a challenge to overcome.
The same way that what a user might enjoy can be inferred the inverse of that can be used as a signal in the algorithm as well. Personalization is just relevance and all is just a matter of tuning.
The challenge is that people switch very quickly between these search modes and don't even think about it.
Do you have any proof that this isn't what all search engines actually do?
My own standing is that most of the time you need what you have to have to complete task at hand. Then you could go at YouTube and refresh "Recomendations" to your heart content.
The other way around is to wreak havoc to important parts of your life.
- Search for term on DDG - Look at results, find nothing - Try to find better term - Give up and use original term in Google - Find result
I tried to use DDG exclusively two time (once 8 months ago, once ~4 months ago), but the result was the same. I don't know how much personalization affects this, but Google just gives me the best results.
"There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results."
Even if you're a Sailor Moon fan, you might actually be looking for information about the rock rotating around this planet when searching for "moon". In the same vein I might be a liberal but be looking for a multitude of opposing views and ideas when googling "core values of NRA members".
Oh btw, we engineers, our algorithms, aren't smart enough to foretell people's inclinations based on their past habits, we also can't read minds. The increasing use of personalization as a factor for relevancy will, imho, lead to user dissatisfaction, precisely because they make shoddy assumptions.
Believe it or not, but some people also want to be surprised and learn new things. YES. We exist!
Changing the language not that intuitive in Google, it's a drag. I have to do it all the time when I clean my cookies, and sometimes I still get crappy "pt.wikipedia.org" results on top instead of "en.wikipedia.org" just because my browser isn't in english and I don't want to change it just because of Google.
I might want to type www.google.it and search for Berlusconi news in Italia, but it won't let me, because it just show me brazilian news. So yeah, I can't even get to another bubble.
Also, apparently Google filters by IP, since searching via Tor or a VPS renders very different results. I dislike this for personal reasons because it breaks the internet for me.
Also, I might not like the fact that Google collects stuff about my search habits, which is also a valid concern.
So, there, it's an issue for me. Might be an edge case, might be an exception, but I think that I deserve to know why this happens and the alternatives.
Oh, you know, maybe using Google's much vaunted "PageRank" algorithm, which is supposed to take in to account things such as links on other pages back to the page being considered for inclusion in the search results.. the more such links there are, the better the rank is supposed to be.
The above description is obviously an oversimplification, and I don't have access to Google's PageRank algorithm anyway, so couldn't tell you what it actually was if I wanted to, but it's something along those lines, and need not take in to account your previous search history in any way or "personalize" the search for you.
So I will stay information sided for a while
http://google.com/search?q=paul+graham&pws=0
Also, works well for me.
Exactly the same as the "search term leakage" rubbish.
While some may think that this is hiding, do we not often create algorithms to asses and aide? It seems like disabling this would be against the advancement of a learning system.
I for one think its a great feature and have no desire to disable it.