I agree that it would be cool to expose the different criteria that Google (for instance) is using to help reorder your results, to the degree that those criteria can be discretely identified, but I'm not surprised that they don't; that's a pretty significant portion of their secret sauce they would be publicizing.
I also don't think that mere transparency would really help solve any search engine "filter bubble" problem, if such a thing is real. Nothing would make Joe Google User take five minutes off whatever he came to search for to fiddle with some tree full of sliders on his result page.
Agreed. I wouldn't either 80% of the time. But often I'm making a very directed search that I would really like the "best" results for where best is usually defined as different than the results I'm getting.
Hey, check this out, Google already sort of does it. I didn't know that (probably because I have "web history" turned off, so I don't get customizations.)
I also don't think that mere transparency would really help solve any search engine "filter bubble" problem, if such a thing is real. Nothing would make Joe Google User take five minutes off whatever he came to search for to fiddle with some tree full of sliders on his result page.