Posted on 05/14/2012 11:17:18 AM PDT by listenhillary
(SNIP)
On "the filter bubble" and how it works
One of the things that's really interesting about the filter bubble is that it's invisible. You can't see how your Internet, the websites you visit, are different than what other people see. They are sort of slipping further and further apart.
A couple of years ago, when you Googled something, everyone would get the same result. Now, when I've done these experiments, you can really get these dramatically different results. One person Googles and sees a lot of news about protests and the other person gets travel agents talking about traveling to Egypt.
I'm basically trying to make visible this sort of membrane of personalized filters that surround us wherever we go online, and let's see what we see.
On why the "bubble's" silent nature is bad
It's one thing when you turn on MSNBC or Fox News. When you do that, you know what the editing rule is -- what kind of things you'd expect to see there and what kind of things you'd expect to be edited out. But with a Facebook news feed or Google News, you don't know who they think you are. You don't know what's been edited out. It can really distort your view of the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.cnn.com ...
That’s right. In short, a novel that shows how public perception and more important, level of acceptance can be moved. Good read!
The adage “...never let a good crisis go to waste..” sums it up.
Web 2.0 with location, cached searches, and demographic algorithms is pretty spooky from a consumer point of view. From the standpoint of filtering political thought, it slips right into scary!
Cheers
Tea Party Patriots
Tea Party Movement-Wiki...
Welcome to Tea Party.org
Welcome to the Tea Party Express
Tea Party Patriots-Official Home of the ...
Supposed to be a pretty good secure search engine.
***************************Quote:
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I do not know if the search results from Startpage are STILL personalized or shaped. What do you think?
This is important enough you know, that we actually should
initiate a Secure Search Sandbox thread, much like “HTML Sandbox” we have here on FR.
Bubble-less searching, that it.
Google used to be so incredibly good, they are still the best although much less so.
I clear all my cookies and cache, I use Do Not Track, and have checked off whatever boxes google makes available to avoid personalizing of search results and ads.
The big thing he’s missing is that the filters are really coming from you. If google isn’t throwing you links about protests in Egypt it’s because their records of your use show you don’t care about protests in Egypt, they’re not presenting you with stuff you ignored back when they were. And Zuckerberg is right, a squirrel running through your yard is more interesting to most people than folks dieing in Africa, and it doesn’t say anything bad about us, it’s a matter of how much effect it has on your life. If you’re living in America people dieing in Africa will almost certainly never have a direct impact on your life, that squirrel on the other hand might be rabid, and it’ll certainly send your pets to spasms of hunter instinct.
Because 9 times out of 10 Google will present the results I’m looking for in the first 5 links, and they’re conveniently pre-placed in my search toolbar. I don’t search for politics or morality I search for results and convenience.
startpage is great. Just tried it. It’s my new “default” page.
Thanks.
Bubble-less searching is called the 90s, it was cool at the time but now we’ve learned it’s lame. Here’s how you can prove for yourself how much cooler the bubble is. Go to a bubble search site like google on a machine that can be “tracked”, search for a relatively common business name you’ll find in many cities, notice how because of the tracking they know what city you’re in and return local results; now repeat the search either on a non-bubble site or an untrackable machine, notice how your results are all over the place and unless you live in a big city probably aren’t anywhere near you. That’s why they put the bubble in place, it make your search results more useful for you.
That is insanity to form such a strange limiting notion about research without the researcher choosing it.
The whole fun and value of google was to see the vast sources and variants of information on a particular word or phrase, not a narrow list based on how you used the word or phrase two months ago.
It’s not strange at all. If you actually search for something outside the “bubble” they’ll give it to you. What they’re not giving you is stuff you’ve shown a history of not being interested in that kind of fits your search criteria. So if every time you search for “international affairs” you’ve completely ignored everything relating to Egypt they stop giving it to you.
The fun and value of google for me is getting the information I was actually looking for, not random crap that might or might not be related whether interesting or not. If I’m looking for Egyptian restaurants while I might on a grander scale be interested in what’s going on in Egypt the links I’m primarily hoping for would be Egyptian restaurants within short drive of me. Blind dive searches are only for when I’m EXTREMELY bored, and I haven’t been that bored this century.
Start page still uses google though, but I do not know if the search results are still somehow personalized.
I use them for secure searches.
I do not like being a bubble boy.
Yeah you do. You just don’t like the implications. But anytime that restaurant you were thinking about trying winds up in the first 5 links with driving directions from your house you LOVE the bubble.
That is the insanity, googling "international affairs" should be just that, it shouldn't be focused on that Cuban story you were concentrating on 6 months ago, or avoiding Egypt because they are reading your mind and thinking that no, this guy wants Cuba, when actually, Egypt is the dominate story currently and what triggered your search.
The first week or so that I ran into being locked in by that bubble, I was totally baffled by the whacky personalized links coming up, last night I was looking up "Numbers" a homosexual book from the 1960s to make a post here, the next time I am searching for numbers I doubt that it will have anything to do with that book, or homosexuality, or gay literature.
So if I Google “Big Boobs” expecting to get Bill Clinton and Obama, but end up with a sex site, it’s because Google knows I like voluptuous women more than lying Democrats?
There’s nothing insane about it. It’s following YOU, if you don’t click on those stories you clearly aren’t interested so why should it keep presenting them to you? They aren’t reading your mind they’re reading your HISTORY, they know what results you’ve clicked on from previous similar or identical searches in the past. And again, you can always cut through the bubble by making your search specific, they aren’t going to not give you stuff on the protests in Egypt if you search on “egypt protests” they’re only going to not give them to you if your search is on a broader term AND you’ve shown a clear history of completely ignoring that topic in the past.
One search probably isn’t going to be setting up an odd precedent. For stuff like that they’re looking for a pattern. If you’re regularly picking the gay link from seemingly unrelated google searches then yeah they’re gonna focus you down that path, but then if you’re regularly picking the gay link from seemingly unrelated google searches then that’s the path you’ve already been on, they’re just helping you out. One poke for a gay book from the ‘60s isn’t going to turn all of your number related searches into festivals of rainbow flags.
The whole thing is based on tendencies, not single occurrences which are often outliers and therefore not useful. The whole goal is to be useful, to make it more likely for the results you want to be in the first 5. So they pay attention to your patterns, what you’re actually clicking on so they can make it easier for you.
Most folks do.
But if you go digging deep enough to eventually find the Clinton and Obama links and click on those and do it repeatedly eventually those are gonna be in your top 5.
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