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> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google. It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article a
by freeflight 8y ago
> To be honest I've never noticed the filter bubble everybody is talking about with Google.
It's extremely obvious/bad when you try Googling some old article about an topic, often political, that has recently regained popularity.
You can try adding all kinds of words from the headline, certain terms will always lead to the results being dominated with "current news", like with Russia/Ukraine or more recently with China.
Which is made worse by the inability to specify a time-frame for the search. In that regard, the best Google can do is narrow it down to "last changed" with the extended search, which only goes as far back as "last year", anything further back than that and you might as well have to find the needle by manually looking trough the haystack of pages upon pages of search results.
It can be extremely frustrating how search results are seemingly dominated by the very same, handful, of articles offering only the very same takes, with only slight variations. It feels quite similar to how YouTube keeps recommending the same kind of weird videos to a large amount of people, like you are being "funneled".
- marcoperaza 8y agoYou can specify a date range in Google btw. You click “tools” and then it will present a date option.
- kyrra 8y agoThis is exactly what I do as well. Date range filter in on Google is excellent to find old news.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoUnfortunately on mobile you can only use the date ranges that Google suggests (last hour, day, week, month, or year). Which is unfortunate since half the time I want to filter by date it's so I can exclude recent results.
- freeflight 8y agoI remember it being there, but for whatever reason, I was always looking for it under "extended search". Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
- dirkgently 8y agoTo me, it seems all this long explanation is just posturing when a simple example would have proven your point.
- freeflight 8y agoThe simple example here being how Google seems to prioritize "current news", particularly those clicked the most often, over actual search results. Which from the outside feels very similar to how YouTube tends to "harmonize" it's dynamic playlists aka "mixes" to such a point that all of them end up being the same after the first 1-2 songs because everything after that seems to be strictly based on personalization and not the original song the mix was created on.
- bad_user 8y agoPrioritizing current news might be annoying, but it can't be a filter bubble, as we aren't talking of personalisation. Basically I would be interested in a sample where say a democrat gets different opinion pieces versus a republican, on the same search query. I feel that such samples could exist, but I haven't witnessed such instances in my daily use.
- freeflight 8y ago> Prioritizing current news might be annoying, but it can't be a filter bubble Never said a thing about filter bubbles, but in a way, it feels like a self-reinforcing loop: 0 An article gets clicked often 1 Google ranks it higher in the results based on those higher click counts 2 It gets clicked even more often due to being ranked higher in the results 3 goto 0 Behavior like that might be fine when one is looking for something obscure technical to surface more relevant results. But when it's applied to news articles it creates the impression of a bias/funnel as the top results will regularly consist of the same, slightly altered, headlines and conclusions. Which in part is probably the result of a lot of news-outlets just copy&pasting AP releases. Note: I'm not saying this is done on purpose, it might very well just be a manifestation of the increased use of AI/ML where the end results often can't be properly explained/reasoned as the ML has become sort of a blackbox optimizing towards a given goal, like giving results that are more likely to be clicked.