You can't just handwave "useful" as an explanation for why location-based SERP discrimination is desirable.
It is "useful" for me to be on the phone with someone in Cleveland and describe how to find something on the Web, expecting that they can follow a similar set of steps at a similar time and get a similar result.
A (sort-of-)deterministic Web can be good and useful. It is a very strong statement of preference and exercise of power to declare that "useful" results must be meaningfully different based on the characteristics of the individual searching.
For whom is that exercise of power most beneficial? I would argue that a rapidly shifting, slippery, personally-dependent presentation of the world's information is extremely useful as a tool of control, but gives only occasional and relatively marginal benefit to individual searchers.
The 2016 US election is a big case in point. Personalizing information delivery, when coupled with asymmetric processing power and data availability, lets you have situations where an atomized polity winds up seeing what suits each individual, but with a radically degraded ability to form collective truths or consensus.
The definition of "useful" is an exercise of power.
It is "useful" for me to be on the phone with someone in Cleveland and describe how to find something on the Web, expecting that they can follow a similar set of steps at a similar time and get a similar result.
A (sort-of-)deterministic Web can be good and useful. It is a very strong statement of preference and exercise of power to declare that "useful" results must be meaningfully different based on the characteristics of the individual searching.
For whom is that exercise of power most beneficial? I would argue that a rapidly shifting, slippery, personally-dependent presentation of the world's information is extremely useful as a tool of control, but gives only occasional and relatively marginal benefit to individual searchers.
The 2016 US election is a big case in point. Personalizing information delivery, when coupled with asymmetric processing power and data availability, lets you have situations where an atomized polity winds up seeing what suits each individual, but with a radically degraded ability to form collective truths or consensus.
The definition of "useful" is an exercise of power.