

On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers - cainetighe
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203347104578099122530080836-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email

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carbocation
This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search)
that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the
interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the
journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what
they might derive from a better-written headline.

The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising
and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't
trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until
recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]

By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn
something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I
think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on
the topic.[2]

[1] =
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&geo=US&cmpt=q)

[2] = [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-
compl...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-completely-
de-personalize-google-results.html)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I'm planning on blogging a bit on this particular topic tomorrow. If you have
any questions, please let me know and I'll try to address them.

I don't think the gTrends argument works though (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741590>). Most of the results inserted
are super-recent (and so I expect the recency of the trends data -- like the
last 90 days -- to dominate). Of course it is all a black box so who knows.

Some of the more interesting things to me are:

\--you can't reliably de-personalize (as you cited).

\--the variation in results across our study was great.

\--variation for signed out (even incognito) users was not much different from
signed in users.

~~~
carbocation
It would be vaguely interesting to know from study participants how unique
their browser is.[1] Mine appeared to yield the same result whether in
incognito mode or not, but I can't really see Google using this approach.

Your point about Google trends is counterintuitive but evidence-supported,
which makes it particularly interesting. It may well be that they are looking
at outcome measures after search personalization, and abandoning
personalizations that yield no results. Or perhaps a certain volume is
required over time for a particular query before triggering an automated
personalization trial. As you say, it's a black box, so who knows.

[1] = <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>

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alanctgardner2
I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.

<http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney>

Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in
terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a
fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.

Come on WSJ, you can do better.

edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular
in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches
are:

1) Burundi 2) Guinea 3) Rwanda 4) Sierra Leone 5) United States

Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue),
Romney (red) and taxes (yellow):
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&date=today+3-m&cmpt=q&geo=US)

If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are
newsy), it is similar:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%20taxes&geo=US&date=today%203-m&gprop=news&cmpt=q)

Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than
Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security,
health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20security%2C%20taxes%2C%20health%20care%2C%20abortion&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q)

~~~
alanctgardner2
I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words
doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple
graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Sorry for not being clear (was also trying to not be verbose!). All it shows
is that all those terms were searched a lot less than Romney for the past 90
days, and yet they all were found to alter subsequent search results after
searching them (unlike Romney).

------
haberdasher
Alternate Headline: DuckDuckGo chief, trying to rustle up more users from
Google personalization-fear-baiting, spoon feeds article to WSJ.

What'd I miss?

~~~
drivebyacct2
Is there evidence of this?

~~~
mherdeg
Sure, read the last few paragraphs of this Journal article. The reporter is up
front about her source: "Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's
attention.""

""In September, Gabriel Weinberg, founder and chief executive of tiny Duck
Duck Go Inc., which markets itself as a privacy-protecting search engine,
stumbled across the "you recently searched for" phenomenon in a study he
conducted of Google's personalization efforts. Mr. Weinberg, whose site is
based in Paoli, Pa., asked 131 of its users to search Google for several
keywords at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 2: "Obama," "abortion" and "gun
control." His testers received a wide variety of different results that
appeared to be personalized by location and other factors.

Mr. Weinberg also noticed that some testers received results labeled "you
recently searched for Obama," and discovered that he couldn't replicate the
same label when searching for Romney. Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to
the Journal's attention.""

There's no shame in running an interesting story that's brought to your
attention by someone with vested interests.

For example, notorious fraudster Barry Minkow dug up a list of all the
executives in publicly traded corporations who lied about their college
degrees and gave that information to the WSJ after short-selling the
companies, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652836844922165.html>.

Win-win -- the Journal got an important news tip, and he made some money on
the bounce.

Unfortunately for Minkow, he couldn't resist going after _just_ bad companies
and ended up in prison for defrauding a home-building company,
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190346110457646...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461104576460033311796732.html).

------
amalag
WSJ is really turning into Murdoch's mouthpiece. The breaking news is that at
standing president of 4 years has different search results than his opponent?

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achille
Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience

1\. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com

2\. Set the default search engine to:
[https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s](https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s)

Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately --
though is a good start at protecting yourself.

~~~
achille
Sorry, meant to say depersonalize. Care to expand why this doesn't work? Just
ran the same test, and I see the exact same results.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yes, what you said sounds plausible and is indeed intuitive, but we've found
it empirically to be untrue.

In fact, on fresh private mode browsing (cookies cleared) when people searched
for the same result at the same time, we still saw significant variation in
results, even in the same country and on non-location results.

~~~
moultano
This may have nothing to do with personalization.
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-
at-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-
google.html) "We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of
queries are shown results from alternative search approaches."

Many small experiments can lead to differences for a reasonably large fraction
of queries.

------
BrianPetro
This TED talk does a good job explaining the concepts of what is happening in
this article.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

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DanielBMarkham
"...In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased.
For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers..."

I hate to continue the political thread, but "biased" doesn't quite cut it.
Algorithms don't automatically make everything magic. There is a structural
issue that just saying "it's the algorithm" doesn't explain or address.

No doubt the data leans that way because Obama has been a searchable term for
longer. This just leads to the natural question: should incumbents be given
extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more
content? I don't think so, but I find myself arguing with a mathematical
formula. The nature of the social value of making democratic decisions is
different from the nature of the personal value of targeting results.

Weird.

~~~
shasta
"should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because
they've generated a lot more content?"

Since the incumbent has already campaigned the previous election, fairness
dictates that he shouldn't be allowed to campaign at all against the
challenger.

------
maratd
> In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For
> a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers.

This is pure nonsense. Algorithms are written by humans and are just as biased
as their creators.

