
People think they hate personalized search, but they actually love it. - joelhaus
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/EJUtbeV1YSS
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jerf
This is an attempt to rationalize away people's concerns without having to
address them. People really do have concerns, and if they are not precisely
what is being articulated and the words don't precisely match the actions,
that is _not_ proof they don't exist. It merely means that people are not
successfully articulating them. It would be better to try to figure out what
they actually are than to take the psychologically appealing route of
explaining them away in your own Google-centric worldview, then thinking
you've actually addressed anything.

Edit: For posterity I'll leave up "Google-centric", but thanks mdwrigh2;
please consider it struck. I still think there's an attempt to dodge around
what the concerns actually are.

~~~
mdwrigh2
Just to make sure its clear, the author of this runs a media company and is
not a Googler. I'm not sure he benefits at all by rationalizing away "people's
concerns without having to address them".

~~~
jacobolus
It’s possible to write rationalizations and duck relevant arguments without
necessarily being a paid shill.

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MattJ100
Erm, if ever, here is a real candidate for the correlation != causation
lesson.

I think it would be doing a massive disservice to Google to say that the only
reason people use their service is because of personalized search results.
Google _do_ have good search results (in my subjective opinion, at least) -
but that is not why I used them (I now use DDG).

Google had the cleanest and simplest UI, non-intrusive adverts, and generally
didn't "get in the way".

I'm now using DDG because Google has lost these qualities - I reached a point
where I found myself fighting with Google's UI "improvements" more and more.
Now I'm thankfully back to the point where search is just search again, and I
don't mind some adverts on the side - there's no such thing as a free service.

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breckinloggins
People don't hate personalized search, they hate not knowing what's going to
happen with the information.

Personally, I love how convenient it is for Google to know as much as it does
about me. But I then have to begrudgingly trust that they "won't be evil" with
that information. It's a tradeoff, and I like to think that most people
understand it as such.

~~~
maggit
I'm a person, and I hate personalized search exactly because of what
personalized search is. I don't want to live in a filter bubble. If I search
for my name, I obviously want to know what other people would see about me.
The same goes for any kind of ego-searching (my software projects, for
example) If I search for "where to buy x", I want to see where Google thinks
it is best to buy x, regardless of the fact that I am in Norway. Regardless of
who I have in my G+ circles. If I want to narrow the search, I can do it
myself. Even when I search for "mono", I _want_ to be reminded that the world
largely thinks mono means mononucleosis, _not_ the mono compiler and runtime.
I am part of the world, dammit, and I don't want Google to go out of their way
to avoid showing me that world.

I _also_ hate Google's hoarding of information about me, but this hate is
completely orthogonal.

~~~
andylei
> I hate personalized search exactly because of what personalized search is

i don't understand what your rant is about. just don't use personalized
search; its a completely optional feature.

~~~
maggit
>> People don't hate personalized search

> I hate personalized search

That's what it's about. Just a counter example to a sweeping statement.

Although, now it seems that "personalized search" might mean different things
to different people; I'm not only talking about Search Plus Your World. I've
had to go to extra trouble to get google to show me results not tweaked for
Norway. I mean -- I still get to hate it if it is optional, as long as it is
bothering me, don't I? :)

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jpadvo
I recently found a package of sunflower seeds in my cupboard that had MSG in
it. MSG is absolutely delicious, a magical powder that can turn the blandest
food into a flavorparty.

But as a rule, I avoid it whenever I can because it is essentially a slow
acting poison. When I purchased those sunflower seeds, I did not understand
what they were made from. Had I known, I would not have become a user of that
company's sunflower seeds.

I loved those sunflower seeds, but I most certainly did not love what they
were made from. And I would have rejected them had I known at the start,
despite their delicious flavor.

Applying the moral of this story to the topic at hand is left as an exercise
for the reader...

~~~
nsns
On a side note... MSG has never been proved to be harmful, even after more
than 40 years of tests. It is consumed daily by about a third of the world's
population, and occurs naturally by combining certain foods
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami>). The Western aversion to MSG is
irrational, and misses on a potential alternative to table salt (which is
actually more harmful). Apologies for being OT!

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bicknergseng
I think people just hate the idea of change. Look at the Facebook UI
redesigns. Every time they do a major change, people freak out and scream
bloody murder for about 3 or 4 days, even if the new design is better than the
old.

Something similar is happening for Google with both this and their ToS
changes. They're largely improvements, but many people hate the thought of
partially relearning or adapting to a new or changed system.

I generally think moving people from old to new is best, even if they cry
about it. The trick is to ignore the ones complaining for the sake of
complaining while addressing legitimate grievances.

~~~
Gormo
"Old" and "new" don't describe intrinsic qualities, they're just indicators of
what sequence things arrived in, which is something wholly orthogonal to the
value or utility of the things in question.

Yes, people may often be uncomfortable with change per se - but if it's
fallacious to presume that change is always bad, it's equally fallacious to
presume that newer is always better.

Much of the criticism of Google's recent changes describes valid objections to
the nature of Google as a tool in its present state, not just complaints that
it's different from what they're used to.

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kijin
Fallacy alert: Just because people love Google search doesn't mean they love
it _because_ it is highly personalized. In the absence of better data, one
could just as easily substitute "despite" for "because" in that sentence. The
author's argument is analogous to saying that China's stance on civil rights
is perfectly OK because everyone buys electronics made in China.

I'm rarely logged into Google, and I send the DNT header. This results in very
little personalization of my search results, if at all. And I still prefer
Google's search results to anything served up by Bing or DDG.

~~~
feylias
Yes. I looked through the comments on the article and the comments here
waiting for someone to point out what the article should have addressed. That
correlation isn't causation is so basic I'm still not sure I didn't maybe miss
something in the main text.

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lucb1e
He talks like the statistics from 2004 have anything to do with the latest
social search changes. There have been a lot of complaints and a lot of fuzz
about the new privacy policy and the latest updates to personalised search,
but do people really want it? I certainly don't, every time I've had a social
result from Google+ come up, it was something useless.

Today I was looking up how to set a field to unsigned integer in mysql
(result: you can't), and a post of mine where I mentioned MySQL pops up. Well
thank you so much, what I already knew is what I was NOT looking for. I'll use
Google+'s search if I want to find a post on Google+.

Also I may be the exception, but ever since I tried DuckDuckGo I liked it more
and more. This is mostly thanks to that it's the default search engine in
Linux Mint (I figured I should, as a good software developer, get some
experience with Linux--probably going to switch to another distribution soon
though), but since today I also have "d keyword" bound to duckduckgo search in
Firefox on my laptop and at internship. It just works great for most things I
search for.

Social search... yeah many things have been said about it, but a classic
example is the restaurant. Wouldn't you want to get restaurants near you,
rather than one in Iran (let's pretend that is a top ranking one)? Well, no,
absolutely not. If I want a restaurant nearby, I'll open up Google Maps on my
phone, zoom to the range I want to search within, and search for 'restaurant'.
Or if I can't do that, I'll simply Google for 'restaurant city-name'. This
localization is also rendered useless when you want to find a restaurant to
take your girlfriend to and you are not whereever you would like to take her.
Oh and don't forget that Google can't really find the location of most desktop
computers, it will only work on laptops and mobile devices when they share
their location.

The only possible benefit I can see from this is that you don't have to type
the city name when you mean the city you're currently at. Still though, I'd
like it better if Google suggested "Did you mean: restaurant [current city]"
instead of assuming that's what you meant.

 _I'd like to see how many people prefer Google's search now against how many
prefered it 6 months ago. That's about the timeframe they really started
releasing more social products._

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dinkumthinkum
He says "what do you think?" and I think he is incredibly bad and interpreting
data. Google has been a juggernaught for years. The fact that they both have a
lot of users that like them and that people don't want these kinds of results
that they have started to do _recently_ are not mutually exclusive concepts.

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gyardley
One of these days I hope and pray Google's personalized search will be smart
enough to stop 'correcting' my spelling to something I wasn't actually looking
for.

If I actually _do_ spell something wrong, I'll realize it and happily fix it.

~~~
icebraining
That's what the Verbatim tool is for. It's a shame one can't set it as
default.

------
lojack
I actually like personalized search, except when I'm searching for anything
remotely non-technical. Ubuntu Forums are the top result when I search for flu
symptoms.

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asdfasdf4321
Heh, Google really is making a big mistake here. People search for weird shit
on Google and don't want anyone else finding out. I mean all it takes is a few
people accidentally 1+'ing a "weird" page, their friends ridiculing them, and
the person whining on the internet.

Seriously, all the search people are screwing this up. Once Bing integrates
with Facebook as well, people are going to start freaking out. Nobody cares if
advertisers track them looking at stupid shit. It's only when
parents/coworkers/friends see that stuff when it matters.

"Personal" social search is a fake problem domain. The real one is creating
anonymous searching, and grouping people into anonymous artificial circles.

"Here is what other people looking at anal beads liked" is what we need, not
"Mom, Dad liked this (Anal Beads) search". I know this may be factually wrong,
but it doesn't matter. People are going to start thinking it does/will happen.
Fear propagates faster than facts. Once people start getting privacy phobic
they WILL lash out. It just hasn't reached the tipping point.

It's sad when Moot knows more about the fate of the internet than the people
putting the $$$ into it.

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zbuc
> First of all, that last sentence is in error. Google has been personalizing
> search since the summer of 2005.

But isn't this article only referencing "personalizing search" in relation to
Google Search+ Your World?

What sorts of personalization existed in Google Search results before GSPYW?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Google has done several forms of personalization before "search plus your
world":

\- Google detects your location (using GeoIP and similar) and personalizes
results that way, both by redirecting you to google.$countrycode and by
providing location-specific search (such as map results). You can't turn off
the location-specific results, you can only make them more vague (by setting
your location as a country rather than a city).

\- Google detects if your IP address comes from a .edu; among other things,
visiting google.com from a .edu will produce a message at the bottom of the
homepage saying "Graduating? Come work with us!"

\- Unless you turn it off, Google personalizes search results based on what
you've previously searched for and clicked on.

Personally, I think this article has done nothing more than mistake
correlation for causation, by saying that because Google keeps adding more
personalization and Google's usage keeps growing, that therefore people must
like personalization despite people saying they don't want it. I'd suggest
instead that people dislike personalization just as they say they do, but that
people either don't hate it enough to switch, or don't feel they have a
credible alternative to switch to.

~~~
zbuc
Yep, your last paragraph is what I've been feeling.

I've anecdotally seen much different results from Google since Google + Your
World... searching for technical documentation has become gross -- the same
queries for myself and coworkers will return different results.

But where is there to go? Duck Duck Go seems OK but I don't feel as
comfortable using their UI as I do Google's. Probably just an issue of
familiarity.

