Thanks for this detailed answer (and I do use Verbatim all the time; this is the best thing that ever came out of Google recently).
You're quite convincing about the "hyperbole" part, but I'd argue this is par for the course for journalists: they have to exaggerate a bit.
But where I completely disagree with you is when you say:
> Then he says "If you don’t follow Lee and you do the same search, you won’t get that post." Again, that's the idea of the personalized search option..... and again, it is an option that can be turned off if you don't think it's useful.
The post he's talking about is the most relevant result for that search. If Google only shows it to people who follow the author of the post, then they will have broken search in favor of some kind of "social" thing that is much worse than what we had before.
You're quite convincing about the "hyperbole" part, but I'd argue this is par for the course for journalists: they have to exaggerate a bit.
But where I completely disagree with you is when you say:
> Then he says "If you don’t follow Lee and you do the same search, you won’t get that post." Again, that's the idea of the personalized search option..... and again, it is an option that can be turned off if you don't think it's useful.
The post he's talking about is the most relevant result for that search. If Google only shows it to people who follow the author of the post, then they will have broken search in favor of some kind of "social" thing that is much worse than what we had before.