10 ms·

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of

by hzay 9y ago

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation of it. An unpersonalized search engine is much better than this thing that simply hides any interesting content from you in favor of showing you something related to your previous search or to whatever nonsense your neighbors look up. Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.

Ice_cream_suit 9y ago
Using Baidu and Yandex for searches is instructive.
oblio 9y ago
I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.
amelius 9y ago
> It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-strategy-online-retailers-michelle-ewoldt https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...
piker 9y ago
> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.
- chx 9y ago
  Lenovo has a policy of cancelling orders if the billing and shipping address country does not match. Fine. So they know I am Canadian because otherwise I couldn't make an order. Right? You can't get to the chat when travelling because it's geofenced based on your IP instead of order number / serial number of the laptop.
- lentil_soup 9y ago
  Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked. Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!
  - beojan 9y ago
    Amazon is particularly irritating for this. If you use, for instance, amazon.fr, the UI is only available in French, even though it's mostly a translation of the English UI on amazon.com.
  - Daycrawler 9y ago
    No need to be asked. The browser sends the Accept-Language header depending on the language set in the browser's settings, which defaults to the OS language for the browser installed by default (other browsers will ask at installation). In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Asking is more reliable. There is no reason for a site to believe it should translate stuff for me just because my browser's interface is in another language. Do use the header, but always be open for the user changing the language too.
PeterisP 9y ago
For practical usage e.g. finding information on technical topics (where reliably getting relevant results quickly is important, and randomly finding/exploring new "interesting" content is not), the google's personalization is immensely valuable to me; it gives me a source telling what I want on the first try, but the more-privacy-less-personalization alternatives can find the same thing only if I fine-tune the query multiple times. Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.
- hobofan 9y ago
  > Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. It's also very useful for learning new things. Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless. I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability.
  - marksellers 9y ago
    I find curated lists better for exploration than search, but perhaps I just lost my ability to search whimsically. To each their own I guess.
Zarel 9y ago
...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested. The idea of a filter bubble is definitely worth addressing, but I see no reason why getting more information music notes when I'm trying to search for information about C# is remotely beneficial. I can use Startpage or Incognito if I want to avoid filter bubbling, but for the vast majority of searches I do, relevance to me is useful. But it's not best addressed through fear-mongering. Don't call it a child's imitation just because you don't understand how it could be useful.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise. You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is. Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is that "If I search for something in Seattle, it would be stupid to return results in Chicago"? Probably not. My webdev friend was excited that her personal site was being returned in her search results whenever someone searched a project she had worked on. I suggested that google was serving her personalized results. She searched in incognito. Her site was still being returned. Pretty good, right? She was getting exposure. When we used a VPN, she was not in the results. Google knew that our searches came from our IP address, and that searches from our IP should include her site, since she mostly visited her site from our IP. Or something along those lines. Either way, it was a misleading worldview. I'm going to be harsh for a second, but I mean this lovingly: Stop being naive. It's important for us to be skeptical of Google. They're the thousand-pound gorilla, and the moment they do more than wink and nod at their "Don't be evil" philosophy then we should start getting scared.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language. I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc. Similarly, having some basics about your geographic location, spoken language, etc. would seem to be quite helpful. If only to help separate out things like that there are 8000+ "Park Street" in the US when I type in an address and Google gives me the one closest to my location.
- cyphunk 9y ago
  you imply that when someone that is not a programmer, and say works in the rare stones industry, goes to google to search for ruby gems, that they are not shown a bunch of programmer garbage?
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    I'm implying that Google "learns" over time that I'm more interested in ruby the programming language and that a jeweler would over time get more gemstone related resources.
  - pawelk 9y ago
    Personalized disambiguation can be really handy. I'm a hobby woodworker, I've recently bought a vintage Record #4 hand plane and wanted to learn more about it. I found out this model was manufactured in 1939-1945. So without thinking I type record plane 1939-1945 into Google. And guess what? I get information about hand planes, pictures of hand planes in the images section, links to ebay auctions for vintage planes etc, and in between these there were only a few results related to aircraft combat during WWII. The same query in incognito mode doesn't return even a single link related to hand tools.
- orclev 9y ago
  That's at least partially the fault of that particular language getting cute with their naming and not considering the impact that has a on trying to disambiguate things without having to introduce further context. Ruby isn't the only one who commits that particular sin (looking at you Chef). Java arguably commits the same sin with regard to the core language, but considering how rarely "java" is used on its own in reference to the coffee based beverage that's fairly harmless. Moral of the story, stop getting cute with the names of your stuff and naming a bunch of different tools/concepts/frameworks with ambiguous names. If you must do so at least use some clever portmanteaus and don't just straight up steal other words that already have specific completely unrelated meanings. grumble grumble chef knife, chef cookbook, chef recipe, chef cucumber incoherent mumbling
dhimes 9y ago
hopefully typing &pws=0 at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.
- gooseus 9y ago
  This is what I was hoping to find... of course knowing how to do that is completely esoteric. I don't know why they couldn't just put another button next to I'm Feeling Lucky that says "Pretend you don't know me". My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it". Why wouldn't they put a button like that? At what point did optionality and customization of your user experience become undesirable to the point that you need to obfuscate or prevent it? My guess is that too many people read Don't Make Me Think as dogma and now we're in a world where the tech industry assumes they need to do all the thinking for anyone that touches their product and the users brought up in this world have no idea what it's like to not have their UX dictated to them.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    Because it is another premier feature to maintain. Because more buttons mean more people accidentally hit the wrong button and then complain about shitty search results.
    - gooseus 9y ago
      A button that appends that querystring parameter to your search query is a "premier feature" that a multi-billion dollar company is hesitant to maintain? They already have a button that would cause far more confusion if accidentally pressed (Feeling Lucky) since it results in a page that isn't a set of google search results. Sorry, gotta say that those are pretty weak counterpoints... I expected something about how Google's business interest has everything to do with personalized search and each non-personalized search would result in less revenue, or something like that.
      - 9y ago
endorphone 9y ago
How does this sophistry get a pass? Google's search is dominant because it provides the most meaningful, useful results to most people. If you think this is chairs to the moon or a child's imitation, surely there is a market for you to exploit. Otherwise your argument sounds ridiculous, with sentences that together become ridiculously meaningless beyond smearing Google.
- hzay 9y ago
  > surely there is a market for you to exploit Yes I do believe it's up for grabs.
CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
> I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration. And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge. Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it. That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.
ryacko 9y ago
I wish Google would have a clippy-style avatar so that when I put in takeaway pizza, it will tap my screen and ask, "did you mean 'takeaway pizza chicago'?"
- nilved 9y ago
  This makes so much more sense. People are so lazy to type in their location that Google had to spend millions/billions of dollars on technology to stalk you and figure it out for you? I don't buy it.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Robin Sloan did a great bit of fiction about what truly superb Google personalization would look like. No search bar, no results list, just the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You click it, and then the relevant thing happens. I think about that every time I go off to incognito to make Google stop hobbling my results and give me the thing I was actually trying to find.

by hzay 9y ago

Ice_cream_suit 9y ago

Using Baidu and Yandex for searches is instructive.

oblio 9y ago

I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.

amelius 9y ago

> It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-strategy-online-retailers-michelle-ewoldt https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...

piker 9y ago

> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.

chx 9y ago
Lenovo has a policy of cancelling orders if the billing and shipping address country does not match. Fine. So they know I am Canadian because otherwise I couldn't make an order. Right? You can't get to the chat when travelling because it's geofenced based on your IP instead of order number / serial number of the laptop.
lentil_soup 9y ago
Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked. Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!
- beojan 9y ago
  Amazon is particularly irritating for this. If you use, for instance, amazon.fr, the UI is only available in French, even though it's mostly a translation of the English UI on amazon.com.
- Daycrawler 9y ago
  No need to be asked. The browser sends the Accept-Language header depending on the language set in the browser's settings, which defaults to the OS language for the browser installed by default (other browsers will ask at installation). In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Asking is more reliable. There is no reason for a site to believe it should translate stuff for me just because my browser's interface is in another language. Do use the header, but always be open for the user changing the language too.

PeterisP 9y ago

For practical usage e.g. finding information on technical topics (where reliably getting relevant results quickly is important, and randomly finding/exploring new "interesting" content is not), the google's personalization is immensely valuable to me; it gives me a source telling what I want on the first try, but the more-privacy-less-personalization alternatives can find the same thing only if I fine-tune the query multiple times. Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.

hobofan 9y ago
> Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. It's also very useful for learning new things. Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless. I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability.
- marksellers 9y ago
  I find curated lists better for exploration than search, but perhaps I just lost my ability to search whimsically. To each their own I guess.

Zarel 9y ago

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested. The idea of a filter bubble is definitely worth addressing, but I see no reason why getting more information music notes when I'm trying to search for information about C# is remotely beneficial. I can use Startpage or Incognito if I want to avoid filter bubbling, but for the vast majority of searches I do, relevance to me is useful. But it's not best addressed through fear-mongering. Don't call it a child's imitation just because you don't understand how it could be useful.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise. You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is. Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is that "If I search for something in Seattle, it would be stupid to return results in Chicago"? Probably not. My webdev friend was excited that her personal site was being returned in her search results whenever someone searched a project she had worked on. I suggested that google was serving her personalized results. She searched in incognito. Her site was still being returned. Pretty good, right? She was getting exposure. When we used a VPN, she was not in the results. Google knew that our searches came from our IP address, and that searches from our IP should include her site, since she mostly visited her site from our IP. Or something along those lines. Either way, it was a misleading worldview. I'm going to be harsh for a second, but I mean this lovingly: Stop being naive. It's important for us to be skeptical of Google. They're the thousand-pound gorilla, and the moment they do more than wink and nod at their "Don't be evil" philosophy then we should start getting scared.
- jdietrich 9y ago

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language. I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc. Similarly, having some basics about your geographic location, spoken language, etc. would seem to be quite helpful. If only to help separate out things like that there are 8000+ "Park Street" in the US when I type in an address and Google gives me the one closest to my location.

cyphunk 9y ago
you imply that when someone that is not a programmer, and say works in the rare stones industry, goes to google to search for ruby gems, that they are not shown a bunch of programmer garbage?
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I'm implying that Google "learns" over time that I'm more interested in ruby the programming language and that a jeweler would over time get more gemstone related resources.
- pawelk 9y ago
  Personalized disambiguation can be really handy. I'm a hobby woodworker, I've recently bought a vintage Record #4 hand plane and wanted to learn more about it. I found out this model was manufactured in 1939-1945. So without thinking I type record plane 1939-1945 into Google. And guess what? I get information about hand planes, pictures of hand planes in the images section, links to ebay auctions for vintage planes etc, and in between these there were only a few results related to aircraft combat during WWII. The same query in incognito mode doesn't return even a single link related to hand tools.
orclev 9y ago
That's at least partially the fault of that particular language getting cute with their naming and not considering the impact that has a on trying to disambiguate things without having to introduce further context. Ruby isn't the only one who commits that particular sin (looking at you Chef). Java arguably commits the same sin with regard to the core language, but considering how rarely "java" is used on its own in reference to the coffee based beverage that's fairly harmless. Moral of the story, stop getting cute with the names of your stuff and naming a bunch of different tools/concepts/frameworks with ambiguous names. If you must do so at least use some clever portmanteaus and don't just straight up steal other words that already have specific completely unrelated meanings. grumble grumble chef knife, chef cookbook, chef recipe, chef cucumber incoherent mumbling

dhimes 9y ago

hopefully typing &pws=0 at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.

gooseus 9y ago
This is what I was hoping to find... of course knowing how to do that is completely esoteric. I don't know why they couldn't just put another button next to I'm Feeling Lucky that says "Pretend you don't know me". My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it". Why wouldn't they put a button like that? At what point did optionality and customization of your user experience become undesirable to the point that you need to obfuscate or prevent it? My guess is that too many people read Don't Make Me Think as dogma and now we're in a world where the tech industry assumes they need to do all the thinking for anyone that touches their product and the users brought up in this world have no idea what it's like to not have their UX dictated to them.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Because it is another premier feature to maintain. Because more buttons mean more people accidentally hit the wrong button and then complain about shitty search results.
  - gooseus 9y ago
    A button that appends that querystring parameter to your search query is a "premier feature" that a multi-billion dollar company is hesitant to maintain? They already have a button that would cause far more confusion if accidentally pressed (Feeling Lucky) since it results in a page that isn't a set of google search results. Sorry, gotta say that those are pretty weak counterpoints... I expected something about how Google's business interest has everything to do with personalized search and each non-personalized search would result in less revenue, or something like that.
    - 9y ago

endorphone 9y ago

How does this sophistry get a pass? Google's search is dominant because it provides the most meaningful, useful results to most people. If you think this is chairs to the moon or a child's imitation, surely there is a market for you to exploit. Otherwise your argument sounds ridiculous, with sentences that together become ridiculously meaningless beyond smearing Google.

hzay 9y ago
> surely there is a market for you to exploit Yes I do believe it's up for grabs.

CiPHPerCoder 9y ago

> I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration. And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge. Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it. That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.

ryacko 9y ago

I wish Google would have a clippy-style avatar so that when I put in takeaway pizza, it will tap my screen and ask, "did you mean 'takeaway pizza chicago'?"

nilved 9y ago
This makes so much more sense. People are so lazy to type in their location that Google had to spend millions/billions of dollars on technology to stalk you and figure it out for you? I don't buy it.

Bartweiss 9y ago

Robin Sloan did a great bit of fiction about what truly superb Google personalization would look like. No search bar, no results list, just the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You click it, and then the relevant thing happens. I think about that every time I go off to incognito to make Google stop hobbling my results and give me the thing I was actually trying to find.