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.
That is the point, I don't have a research HISTORY, google is trying to make something that doesn't exist for me, I don't want it to try and establish a prediction for what I'm looking for.
They don't know what I am searching for, but they are determined to predict it based on what I looked for last time, when I type in "codpiece" I want to be exposed to an unpredictable variety of references about the search word "codpiece". I do not want to have google steering me to the United States Army's new codpiece because I was looking for a price on it six months ago.
I can see being limited by google search, working for teens and people with narrow, repetitive, interests, but it should be an option, it doesn't work for someone like me.