
Google: Search, plus Your World - Uncle_Sam
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html
======
JeremyBanks
To me, the biggest part of this announcement is this:

 _We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the
results page where you can see what your search results look like without
personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of
search results._

Google's slowly been making their results more personalized, without having an
easy way to opt-out (if you use a Google account). Now that there's this
prominent option, I'm less bothered by them adding more personalization by
default.

~~~
josefresco
How far does this 'de-personalization' go? Do they still factor in user agent,
screen size, geography etc.? I would guess that even an anonymized Google
search is still fairly 'personal'.

~~~
samsoe
If you just log out of your google account search should be fully 'de-
personalized' right?

~~~
jnorthrop
That would be up to Google. They still know your IP address, general location,
browser, OS, etc. and can use that to "personalize" your search results.

~~~
mahyarm
That can still be 5 different people in one house. Or several hundred in a
neighborhood.

~~~
user-id
Cookies can solve that. If that's how it works is another question.

------
bambax
> _Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the
> web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have
> had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are
> often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web._

No, they are not. What's meaningful to me are the experiences of people
(anyone) who have been to where I'm thinking of going, and their average
rating.

Imagine this on Amazon: when considering buying a book, would you want to see
the reviews of "your friends", of which maybe one or two have read the book
you're looking at and taken the time to comment on it, or would you rather
have access to the collective knowledge of millions of Amazon customers...?

~~~
joebadmo
I disagree. Because the things I value are different from the things everyone
else values in a vacation. Same reason I can look at the bestseller list in
Amazon and be completely uninterested in most of the titles.

That's not to say that I have the same taste as all my friends, either. But
it's true that their experiences are often much more meaningful, if only
because I know them well and understand how they would come to the conclusions
they came to regarding a specific review, and I can extract a lot of
information from that.

More than that, though, I want Google to be able to learn from my preferences
and my friends' preferences in order to point me to the most relevant content.

The collective knowledge of the internet as an aggregate, averaged out, is not
useful to me. It doesn't become useful until it's filtered to suit my needs.
Which has always been Google's value proposition.

~~~
troymc
You make some excellent points.

Some of the recommendation engines out there (and it seems everyone has one
these days) are really good at figuring out my tastes and preferences.
Netflix, Amazon, and hunch.com (now owned by eBay) come to mind. hunch.com
recommendations are freaky-good because they ask questions whose core intent
is to learn your tastes.

You're right that my friends' tastes are only weakly correlated with my
tastes. Assuming my friends and I have the same tastes is an error.

I'd also like to add that the reviews of experts are something I still value
over the reviews of others. For example, I'll pay close attention to what Andy
Ihnatko has to say about new Apple stuff. Rotten Tomatoes does something
interesting in this regard: they keep the expert reviews (e.g. Roger Ebert)
separated from the "everyone else" reviews.

If you think about it, a core idea of pagerank was to figure out which sites
are most authoritative. Now the question becomes: who is the most
authoritative on topic X?

~~~
joebadmo
_Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?_

I think that _was_ Google's project. I think now it's: who is the most
authoritative on topic X in a way that's personally relevant to me, even if I
have never heard of that person before?

I sort of agree with you on professional reviewers, but I sort of don't. The
dilemma of a professional reviewer is that as soon as you're a professional
reviewer, you're not really a normal consumer anymore and your experience of a
product is going to be very different. (For example, a common complaint about
the Android eco-system from reviewers is that it's annoying for each
manufacturer's user interface to be slightly different. But a normal consumer
who buys a phone and uses it for the length of a contract really doesn't care
about this so much as the quality of the skin itself.)

So, basically: I think professional and amateur reviews both have value.

More on topic, though: while I don't really subscribe to the "filter bubble"
theory (I still think the digital medium exposes people to way more different
perspectives and arguments than pre-digital), I do kind of wonder about the
turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of all of this algorithmic ranking. I think
it's a subtly different problem.

------
epaga
I have to admit, reading the article I went back and forth between being
impressed and being slightly freaked out. Best quote from the article that
evokes both of those feelings for me:

"This is search that truly knows me."

Do I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"?

~~~
llambda
> Do I really want my Internet search engine to "know me"?

In a perfect world, where your personal information couldn't be used against
you or for someone else's gain, why not? But we don't live in that perfect
world. I agree, this kind of thing is scary. Between Google's increasingly
lame results (yes I realize this is an attempt to curb that issue) and the
idea that Google is and will become increasingly aggressive about knowing who
I am, I feel like it's time for me to give up Google.

~~~
Zirro
I still would want to see neutral search results though. If I just find
articles where people agree with the opinion I have, I'd live in my bubble
thinking that's the way "everyone" thinks.

------
ximeng
Looks like DDG has led the way on some of this:

Don't bubble:

"We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the
results page where you can see what your search results look like without
personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of
search results."

Default SSL:

"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."

~~~
tonfa
Contrary to DDG, it is really personal content (not ranking) here (i.e.
content that might be accessible only to you). I think the ranking is still
personalized when you disable Search+.

~~~
ximeng
They say "no personalization of results based on your Web History", which
sounds like this affects ranking.

~~~
tonfa
On the help, they say: "On any given search, you can toggle to hide personal
results", which is ambiguous.

~~~
ximeng
[http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2410479)

"If you turn off personal results and stay signed in to your Google Account,
you won't see results personalized based on your Google+ circles (or suggested
connections), Google products, or your search history.

If you turn off personal results and sign out of your Google Account, you may
still see personalized results and results based on the context of your
search."

------
koalaman
the sad part of this is that Google used to be about being 'open', i.e. open
standards and federated services. I like the notion of my indexer containing
both public and acld data, but it's very Microsoftish that all the ACLd data
has to exist within a proprietary repository owned by the indexer. What would
truly be innovative would be a solution that supports crawling of private
information on the web including those sites that aren't part of Google.

~~~
danmaz74
Completely agree on this. On the other hand, this is also a fault on
Facebook's side at not being open with their social graph. If FB had been
open, maybe Google wouldn't have had decided to build G+ in the first place...

~~~
flyt
This is ridiculous. Facebook has a very open API at
<https://graph.facebook.com> that makes nearly all data on Facebook profiles
"open" once the owner has granted permission to access that data.

The issue here is that Google wants unfettered access to scrape/index _all_ of
that data, or at least the public info and then build a huge business around
the copied data.

Facebook isn't stupid. Anybody that would let their biggest competitor walk
in, copy their entire database, then build products on top of it with no
recriprocal business relationship would be stupid. Google doesn't let people
copy their web index, or detailed profiles of everybody on the Internet that
indirectly uses Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc.

Google built G+ because Facebook balked at giving the keys to the kingdom to
Google basically for free, so they decided from now on their only recourse was
to own as much data on their own servers as possible. This contrasts with
their old business of passively indexing what they have access to without
making huge business deals with third parties that still maintain control over
the data Google will increasingly rely upon to stay relevant.

~~~
tomkarlo
Great in theory, but it's impractical to expect that you're going to get your
friends to give access to their FB data so it can show up in _your_ search
results. Just awkward.

------
mladenkovacevic
I think the biggest challenge they will encounter is the need to re-jigger the
notion of what Google does in the minds of their users. When somebody says
"Google" a non-techie person will think "internet search engine".

I think it's going to require a bit of time/marketing/something else to
reshape the notion of Google as broad internet search engine into "it also
searches your personal stuff and also your friend's stuff"

~~~
hack_edu
Its hard for me to imagine they'd want to do that at all. The average non-
techie only knows about Google because it means "internet search engine." Any
complication of this will only bring confusion.

You have to wonder how Bing will respond. Not because they must, but because
it's inevitable that they will replicate any major Google Search features...

------
sssparkkk
Here's to hoping they make the social signal (being plussed by your friends) a
more important part of ranking a website in the search results. It could
really help the non-content sites (read: web apps) that would otherwise have a
hard time ranking highly.

------
paganel
""" Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. """

What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite
sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results,
without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links?
That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself.

And back to the vacation thingie, no, I don't want "to learn from the
experiences your friends have had on their vacations". If anything, I want to
have such an unique and unprecented "vacation experience" that said friends
would sit in awe when I'll post my photos online, and you can surely bet I'll
not just be a copy-cat. This is how "post vacation photos to FB" works, but
this coming from Google with their idealistic and deterministic view on how
the world goes it doesn't really surprise me.

~~~
mayanksinghal
> What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the
> opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant
> results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless
> links?

That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself. If you are worried about a
stalker, not befriending him/her on Google+ and keeping your personal content
private are the obvious solutions. I am almost sure that you were being
sarcastic, but just in case you were pointing out that this increases the ease
of stalkers - well so does nearly every other communication and content
publishing (and retrieval) technology ever created. Phones, forums, blogs,
smarter search engines, social networks and faster/cheaper internet
connections - everything made a stalker's life easy. Knives make it incredibly
easy for bad people to hurt others but we do not condemn the man who invented
the knife or the company that produces them for it.

> ...If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented...

I, on the other hand, would love to know a place that my friends (whose
interest are much similar to me than a general average of the world) loved. It
also means that the place would probably be closer to home, or more accessible
than the general global destination that the world is talking about. Going to
the same holiday destination as a friend doesn't make you less of a individual
as you are suggesting. And still if you believe that you want your destination
to be unique, then 1998 Altavista would be a better search engine - because
whatever popularity metric you choose to rank result, if it is any good it
will end up showing a frequently visited and appreciated destination above
unique and rarely visited others.

And even if you are correct and I am simply and utterly wrong about this, they
do provide a not-personalized search that will give you the vanilla ranking
results. I do not thing that they will serve the purpose but they will take
you to the DDG like suggestions if you like them. I am surprised that many are
not appreciating the changes here, especially after knowing the fact that many
had the same concerns that they want Google to give access to not-personalized
results!

------
bonaldi
Would be great if this included my twitter timeline (am amazed Twitter still
don't let you search that). Possibly even my Gmail.

------
laconian
A lot has changed over the past month:
[http://www.fastcompany.com/1800727/former-bing-product-
lead-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1800727/former-bing-product-lead-why-
personalized-social-search-is-unrealistic-for-now)

------
icebraining
This kind of personalized integration is not new, though: Google has had
Reader integration for quite some time now, so often searches bring up results
from blogs I subscribe to (or at least they did - it doesn't seem to be
working now).

------
troymc
For me, this story isn't so much about "Google makes search results more
personal" as "Google makes SEO all about using Google+ more". (We now have
stronger incentives to use Google+.)

~~~
Zirro
"We now have stronger incentives to use Google+."

Well, I sure don't. This just makes me happy I never started using it.

~~~
troymc
You may not want increased visibility or findability online, which is fine,
but for any person or business who does, these changes from Google mean they
have stronger incentives to use Google+.

------
nodata
Taking personalised search to creepy levels: bye bye Google!

I'll use your gmail, but I'm moving to DDG for search.

~~~
icebraining
So you give them your data (by using Gmail), but are opposed to them showing
to you what you already gave them?

~~~
nodata
Clever use of words.

They host my e-mail, I'm opposed to them having my search queries.

~~~
icebraining
They host and _mine_ your emails for information about your interests.

 _I'm opposed to them having my search queries._

But they already did! It seems you're not opposed to them having you queries,
but to them doing something that might actually be useful to you with such
queries (as opposed to using them just for ads).

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand not wanting Google to know everything
about you, but switching because of this new feature doesn't make much sense,
since it doesn't actually change that, just exposes it.

~~~
Zirro
Now, I don't use Gmail nor Google Search but even if I did use one of them,
90% of what I search for on the Internet does not have anything to do with
what ends up in my e-mail.

~~~
Zirro
Write a post instead of downvoting me without explaining yourself. I went
through my last 20 search queries and found that none of them were related to
what I have in my inbox.

~~~
esrauch
I didn't downvote you, but I really don't understand your point at all. Are
you claiming that your email is completely impersonal and you don't care who
reads it, but your search queries are deeply intimate?

The claim that you are replying to is not that they are getting the exact same
information anyway, it's that they are still getting personal information and
machines, not people, are seeing it and showing you ads/search results.

~~~
Zirro
I was replying to myself, hoping to get the attention of whoever did downvote
me. I did not believe it was you, since you sound like a reasonable person. I
apologize if I didn't make that clear.

I also agree with this claim. I still understood the original post as "if they
can read your e-mail, they know what you've been searching for anyway". This
is simply not true.

------
0x006A
What happened to organizing the worlds knowledge? This looks more like
personalizing the worlds knowledge.

~~~
laconian
Personalization is just organizing on a per-user basis.

~~~
0x006A
Why do they write this than?

    
    
      While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion
      webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family,
      orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology
      enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.
    

What if I want to know about information I did not know about and find people
I do not know? Whats that talk about a single star? What sad and limited view
of the world is this?

------
BrentonG
Huge implications in many directions...but somewhat moot (value wise) until
they get past their early adopter stage. For almost everyone their real social
graph is not defined well enough by Google for this to be extremely useful.

------
surferbayarea
Google, you have now gone over to the dark side. The technical definition of
"do no evil" was that google search would not promote any single entity based
on who they are, rather they would let algorithms and data govern the core
ranking. This seems to be the first VIOLATION of this principle. A HACK has
been inserted into the core search ranking where if the content belongs to
google, it is being given a preferential treatment and higher score. Why
should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr? Seems the
ranking team is just taking a short-cut by only using the data on google's
internal properties in the ranking.. Come on, crawl the rest of the web !!
There is interesting content out there..

~~~
mvgoogler
_he technical definition of "do no evil" was that google search would not
promote any single entity based on who they are, rather they would let
algorithms and data govern the core ranking_

Really? Source? (BTW it's "Dont BE evil" not "Do no evil")

 _Why should a photo on picasa be more highly ranked than one on flickr_

Who said it would be?

What search+ does it that it will (possibly) include pictures from Picasa that
are not public on the web, but that are _owned by or shared with you_ in your
search results.

I'm sure that relevant _public_ photos from flickr will still be ranked and
included as appropriate. But I'm guessing that Flickr/Facebook/SmugMug/etc
(rightly!) will _not_ be sharing any privately shared photos with Google's
web-crawler. So Google can't put those in search results. With photos in
Picasa/Google+ we know which ones you are allowed to see and can maintain
privacy.

~~~
surferbayarea
Well! Google is a search engine. So if I search for my name, why should the
google plus profile show up first, above the facebook or linkedin profile
which probably has a way higher relevance score. Just because you decide to
add a widget to detect a name and show the google plus profile as the first
result, that to me is hacking the search ranking. From the blog-post, say if
you search for music, it might bring up the gplus profile of a famous
musician(not even in your circle or friends). Why should it bring the gplus
page rather than the myspace page for that musician(which might have a way
higher relevance)? That page is public, why don't you show that as the
representative page for that piece of information rather than the self-
promoted gplus page. It's ok to promote one's own product, all it means is
that google search ranking now has a big if-then-else. If google-product, show
at top, else push down :p

------
chintan
Honest question: why can't I have a Facebook Connect on Google search?

~~~
tonfa
Do the Facebook ToS allow storing the data for indexing and searching?

------
capex
What's with Google Blog's line spacing? They've fixed it in Google+, which is
much more readable.

------
studentrob
Dear google: (1) Stop trying to make the default google search personalized.
By default that's not what I want or expect. (2) I don't have so many friends
that I need to "search" through what they've done. Quit trying to keep us
glued to our computers and focus on giving us solutions that get us off the
computer faster.

PS- you're being creepy again

------
GoogleProbz
Nobody that I know is interested in this stuff from Google.

It would be better coming from Facebook...

Google is a creepy organization. I recommend private browsing and blocking all
Google IPs.

