

They Did It: Google Personalizes Search & It Is Not Evil - jonmwords
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/they_did_it_google_personalizes_search_it_is_not_e.php

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cbs
_Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by
turning Web search into a popularity contest._

Didn't google revolutionize search over a decade ago by doing exactly that?

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jonmwords
I see what you mean. But at that time, Google results weren't tied to personal
identities, which had no clear definition yet, and that's what this whole
Google+ project has been about.

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ark15
This includes Google+ content but not GDocs/Gmail content? If Google wants to
really personalize my search and discovery I want universal tags. Let me
browse my content by tags across services. If I have 2 documents, 1 contact
and 3 emails tagged (labeled) 'HN' I want to be able to go into gmail (or some
other page) search label:HN and see all 6 'things'

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groks
Enable 'Apps Search' from here:

<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#settings/labs>

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jasonabelli
I thought that facebook would be the first to come out with personalized
search. It is so interesting watching the Big Four poke and prod at each
others moats. It will be watching to see how everything pans out in the next
10 years.

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akkartik
He's basically saying he overstated his claims in the previous article by
conflating current implementation with how things were going to be
indefinitely.

As a writer and content-producer his whole notion of 'evil' seems to be tied
to identity and attribution. Discussions on this page about privacy are
independent of that. In fact there's two meanings of privacy even on this
page: leaking your private data to your friends, and concerns about how much
Google knows about you.

I wish we could talk about these three issues separately, skipping
increasingly-content-free words like 'evil' and 'privacy'.

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DanielRibeiro
Discussion on Google's announcement:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3447048>

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surferbayarea
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..

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betterth
"It is not evil".

Keep telling yourself that.

Google is selling you to the world, and this is just one more way to get you
on their site and making money for them.

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redthrowaway
And? What's evil about advertising?

Seriously, I'm surprised to see this kind of comment ranked so highly on HN.
Google makes products. Most of them are good, some of them are excellent. In
exchange, they show you ads. The alternative is making the user pay. There's
nothing wrong with this arrangement; it's the default monetization strategy
for a huge number of companies.

The core of the argument seems to be that Google knows too much about you, and
is selling your personal data to advertisers. That's not really the case,
though. Google isn't going to ESPN and saying, "Here's John Smith from
Deerborn, Michigan. He's 38, has a wife and a 4 year old daughter, and cheats
on his taxes. Give me $50." They're simply allowing advertisers to target
users fitting a certain profile. Now, you may not be comfortable with how much
Google knows about you, and that's fine, but targeted advertising is hardly
_evil_.

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joebadmo
Totally agree. "You are the product" is such a reductive, partisan talking
point that at this point it's actually a pretty good filter for intellectual
honesty and critical thinking.

I wrote a whole blog post about it here:
[http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9910020865/you-are-the-
produc...](http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9910020865/you-are-the-product)

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andreadallera
Might this be a trojan horse? This feels like what Facebook does... they
announce a feature which raises public concerns about privacy, then they play
it down a bit on the first release and then proceed to push it as originally
planned on a subsequent iteration.

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jonmwords
Well, if you read my post last week, you know I'd be the last person to let
them off easily, but now that they've put this opt-out control in, they can't
well take it way. That would be suicide.

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andreadallera
It would be suicide to do it _now_. What about in some months, when everybody
has forgot about the debate and most of the users are constantly logged on
google+ and use the feature as their standard search? Again, Facebook does it
all the time and manages to pull it off on a regular basis.

~~~
jonmwords
I can't think of an example of Facebook taking away a _preference_ setting
that users have adopted. Even Facebook doesn't take away controls it has
freely given. It would be one thing to take away the toggle button. That might
happen, and it would suck if it did. But to go in and pull out a user setting
that people are using, that would be astonishing.

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wlesieutre
How about the ability to hide your friends list from people you aren't friends
with?

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jonmwords
Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That was a long time ago.

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GoogleProbz
Google search is great.

Everything else is done better by someone else.

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ubojan
OK, can you tell me better alternatives to gmail, youtube, gdocs?

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raldi
...and to Google Maps, Google News, Google Voice, Google Chrome...

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BrainInAJar
I reject your premise.

Further segregating the echo chamber of the internet is not a good thing.

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jonmwords
But here's the thing: this actually _lifts_ the lid on the echo chamber to be
more open than it was yesterday. Google recognizes that global search is a
necessary option. Before this update, it looked like G+ was just going to be
rammed down every Google user's throat. Now we can opt out without having to
log out!

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StavrosK
I agree with you. Prior to this, the only way to get global search was to add
&pws=0 to the URL. Now, it's a button. It's a big step forward, and not that I
don't like the "bubble", it has its advantages (increased relevance). It's
fantastic to be able to switch between the two modes at the click of a button,
and it's something we didn't have before.

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jonmwords
It's not just a button, either. You can opt out entirely from preferences.

