4 ms·

Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you? I was in the same boat as you but then I investigated what all it could flag on

by meta 16y ago

Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you? I was in the same boat as you but then I investigated what all it could flag on my account and realized that I tricked myself. My categories were actually closer to fortune-telling type stuff. 'You like video games', 'You like online videos', 'You like computers & electronics'. But when I drilled down I found it missed lots of things it could flag me for. Google did not recognize I was a programmer despite me googling for various C apis and programming questions commonly. Last summer I spent a good amount of time learning to garden with much help from google but nothing about that category. I often google books for reviews rather than goto amazon.com directly. Given the amount of interests I have told google about I am actually surprised that they have flagged me for such a conservative set of categories. That said: it is nice to peek under the covers in such a convenient way. Edit: And now I am, oddly, pausing before opting out. If you had asked me if I would have opted out before I had the choice I would have said yes. But now, given the choice to opt out, I wonder if I am actually giving up value. If I opt out do I lose something of value to me: having a better chance of that spacing being filled with something valuable rather than just noise. Is it a fair trade: My interests for a better signal-to-noise ratio? Before I had the choice it felt, to my human brain, that I was getting the short end of the deal. But now that I have a choice my human brain is wondering if it is a fair deal after-all. funny.

minalecs 16y ago
I agree with you in terms of how conservative these categories are, but my assumption was that these are the categories that are most likely to get you to click on consumer products that you'd be willing to act on most immediately. Example: the type of music I'm most interested was categorized correctly, and I tend to look for new music to purchase.
JacobAldridge 16y ago
"Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?" One false positive for me - Beauty - though that's probably my beautiful wife searching. Regarding capturing me - not close. A few periphery interests (comics - because I have Dilbert delivered to my Gmail each day?), but not one business category despite the fact that I work as a business coach, write a business blog, used to edit and run social media for a national business coaching company, and spend a heap of time on HN and elsewhere reading business articles. I also welcomed the awareness because it made me go 'meh'.

by meta 16y ago

minalecs 16y ago

I agree with you in terms of how conservative these categories are, but my assumption was that these are the categories that are most likely to get you to click on consumer products that you'd be willing to act on most immediately. Example: the type of music I'm most interested was categorized correctly, and I tend to look for new music to purchase.

JacobAldridge 16y ago

"Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?" One false positive for me - Beauty - though that's probably my beautiful wife searching. Regarding capturing me - not close. A few periphery interests (comics - because I have Dilbert delivered to my Gmail each day?), but not one business category despite the fact that I work as a business coach, write a business blog, used to edit and run social media for a national business coaching company, and spend a heap of time on HN and elsewhere reading business articles. I also welcomed the awareness because it made me go 'meh'.