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.
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.