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As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

lokedhs 6y ago
Not the original poster, but I've disabled all personalisation that it's possible to disable since forever, and my biggest problem with it is that it still doesn't seem to disable it entirely. So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.
searchableguy 6y ago
I have everything turned off on that page. I am doing fine.
shmerl 6y ago
DuckDuckGo does exactly that. They call it "no bubbling".
awalton 6y ago
I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy. But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.
  - singron 6y ago
    Of course the single best way to make the top more relevant is to block ads. On YouTube, I highly recommend turning off personalization and watch history, especially if you find yourself spending too much time there clicking recommended videos. Without history, it will pretty reliably recommend the same videos again and again, which can help you realize when you have seen a lot and might want to stop.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    As someone who remembers the web before personalization, the product experience was better. It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features. Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.
    - mgraczyk 6y ago
      So Google sends metadata for 5B videos to your browser, then your browser ranks them and shows you the best one? How would your agent do personalization?
      - ethbro 6y ago
        Why doesn't my browser compile and store my viewing habits, then construct searches for me? Searches which Google then executes? Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms. I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned. The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content). It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.
  - jjj123 6y ago
- option 6y ago
  as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that. And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube? A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.
    - mgraczyk 6y ago
      I don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video). Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    "When we A/B tested users against different kinds of personalisation, we consistently found that they liked personalisation" If your non-personalised experience is stunted in functionality because the core UX of the product is biased towards personalisation, it will be unsurprising if people "prefer" personalisation.
DetroitThrow 6y ago
I've actually preferred it on Google services. I seem to get the same recommended videos on YT otherwise and I like how unlikely I am to click on an ad if I ever see one. What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  I work on a lot of different products, usually trying to answer the related question "how much better on average is the personalized experience". Often I look at the more relevant but less profitable question, "what percent of users would have had a better experience without personalization". It's always been <1%.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    I guess "less than one per cent" is a lot more than you implied in your original post, and many of the people most likely to be in that less than one percent are likely to be part of this audience here. It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".
shakna 6y ago
I get more relevant results from DuckDuckGo. Who doesn't do the personalisation to begin with. I have found personalisation doesn't work for any search product. YouTube's ranking engine won't get me what I'm looking for. Google's personalised search doesn't get me what I'm looking for, and the de-personalised whilst better, only gets me halfway there because it still tries to geo-bubble me. I am aware that what I search for makes me slightly outside the norm. All attempts to bubble me fail because of that, and turn your product into nothing more than an exercise in frustration as I try to escape the narrow roads you expect me to walk.
- harha 6y ago
  Being able to control the geo is one of the great features of DDG for me, especially back when I traveled a lot. The search engine doesn’t know the context I’m in (and I’m happy about that, I don’t think it should be guessing something this personal and then limiting the options for me). It also helps me search for content vs for listings, sometimes I want information on a product and not the local merchant, with Google the closest I would get was switching to news search (also not optimal).
hoistbypetard 6y ago
> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. As somebody who uses search products many times a day and who has opted in to the less personalized experience in several different ways over the past several years, I can confidently assure you that I very strongly prefer the "less personalized" experience. Additionally, I don't feel like I need a shower just because I used it. Why on earth would I want you to track me more? I don't see any reason.
qwerty456127 6y ago
> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. I absolutely prefer non-personalized web search results, the YouTube home page you get when you are not signed-in (and have cookies deleted) and suggestions based on the current view only (not on the previous history). I confidently assure you ;-) Obviously there are people who feel different.
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
Personally, I don't like personalization. I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her. That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search. The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize. Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  There's a bunch of anecdotal stories about personalization goes wrong, but I don't see how any of that is a strong enough point. Should you be equally given news about every local news from every city in the world? Should be equally given news about every sport and sport team? What if you don't even like any sports? Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news. I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows. Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.
  - SquishyPanda23 6y ago
    Yes what you describe is what I want. When I search I don't want my search influenced by search terms that are invisible to me and that I can't influence. If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed. What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.
chrstphrknwtn 6y ago
As someone who makes widgets, and can confidently assure you that you need widgets.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  I'm wondering if this assertion comes from some kind of "search bubble" among developers of these tools.
  - mgraczyk 6y ago
    If adding widgets to products caused the product revenue to double, then you probably wouldn't call it a bubble.
    - lokedhs 6y ago
      My previous response was probably a bit snarky. My point was that if this is something that you worked on and you realise that your revenue doubled, then it's probably very easy to justify that to oneself that this is indeed what the users want. After all, you don't hear any negative points, which is what a filter bubble is.
      - mgraczyk 6y ago
        It's not possible to truly know what they want, but it is possible to ask them. Almost all people say they want more personalized content, especially for entertainment. Those who don't want it are free to opt out. The real bubble is around the belief that products with billions of active users somehow thrive without giving users what they want.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  We (and Google) run RCTs constantly, including experiments with no personalization. Users self-report higher satisfaction and NPS with personalization.
skissane 6y ago
I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared. I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist
- awalton 6y ago
  > I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions. I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`. news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.
  - skissane 6y ago
    I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.) When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share" Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always
pirocks 6y ago
I have turned off personalization for several years now. I prefer it off, though admittedly I adblock, and block thumbnails etc...
actuator 6y ago
Yep, I have my main search engine on personal laptop switched to DuckDuckGo. Guess what, more often I just end up typing '!g' for finding something relevant. For US, DDG still is fine I guess for basic results like local websites. If you are traveling to other countries, notice that DDG will often give very bad results for queries with local relevance. I ran away from data collection and personalisation at the start of the last decade, but I often these days leave it on, because it just makes my life easier. Another example would be Google Photos, where letting Google run my photos through algos is very convenient because the simple feature of searching by visual context works like magic. The young privacy freak me would have been horrified if he knew this.
Semaphor 6y ago
> Try it for a month and see if you prefer it. Far longer than a month. It’s a vastly superior experience. 99% of personalization is utter shit. Having hard filters ("never these domains" on search engines, "don’t try and get me to rewatch things" or "No comedy" on Netflix) would top shitty personalization (aka. hey, I’m dumb, but please watch this) every time. edit: For me. I realize that the majority of people seem to want tech to guess/tell them what they actually wanted.
sytelus 6y ago
What would be good and bad examples where personalization excels and fails?
- quicklyfrozen 6y ago
  Given the generic names for a lot of things in tech, it's at least mildly useful that Google knows I'm probably not searching for info on snakes or fruit.
chottocharaii 6y ago
Lol, you can ‘confidently assure’ huh? Clicking that link, turns out I’ve had all of those personalisation features switched off for nearly a year. Don’t be so confident that your ranking/personalisation products are universally appreciated
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  Fortunately I have mountains of data and do not have to trust anecdote and comments. Almost all users self-report higher satisfaction and they behave in ways consistent with strongly preferring personalization.
rainbow-road 6y ago
A few months ago, I disabled all of that stuff, so that YouTube only recommends videos based on my subscriptions and liked videos. I guess it's still personalization, but it's personalization that I have control over, which seems to have drastically improved both the privacy and the quality of recommendations. I don't use Google for search, though, so I can't comment on that.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
And having disabled personalisation on a lot of products for as long as I can remember, I can confidently assure you that yes, I do in-fact prefer the non-personalised experience. I don't want it to display what some service _thinks_ I want, I want it to display what I'm asking for. No more, no less.
dijksterhuis 6y ago
I definitely prefer it.

lokedhs 6y ago

Not the original poster, but I've disabled all personalisation that it's possible to disable since forever, and my biggest problem with it is that it still doesn't seem to disable it entirely. So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.

searchableguy 6y ago

I have everything turned off on that page. I am doing fine.

shmerl 6y ago

DuckDuckGo does exactly that. They call it "no bubbling".

awalton 6y ago

I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.

mgraczyk 6y ago
It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy. But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.
- singron 6y ago
  Of course the single best way to make the top more relevant is to block ads. On YouTube, I highly recommend turning off personalization and watch history, especially if you find yourself spending too much time there clicking recommended videos. Without history, it will pretty reliably recommend the same videos again and again, which can help you realize when you have seen a lot and might want to stop.
- ethbro 6y ago
  As someone who remembers the web before personalization, the product experience was better. It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features. Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.
  - mgraczyk 6y ago
    So Google sends metadata for 5B videos to your browser, then your browser ranks them and shows you the best one? How would your agent do personalization?
    - ethbro 6y ago
      Why doesn't my browser compile and store my viewing habits, then construct searches for me? Searches which Google then executes? Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms. I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned. The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content). It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.
- jjj123 6y ago
option 6y ago
as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that. And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube? A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.
  - mgraczyk 6y ago
    I don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video). Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  "When we A/B tested users against different kinds of personalisation, we consistently found that they liked personalisation" If your non-personalised experience is stunted in functionality because the core UX of the product is biased towards personalisation, it will be unsurprising if people "prefer" personalisation.

DetroitThrow 6y ago

I've actually preferred it on Google services. I seem to get the same recommended videos on YT otherwise and I like how unlikely I am to click on an ad if I ever see one. What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.

mgraczyk 6y ago
I work on a lot of different products, usually trying to answer the related question "how much better on average is the personalized experience". Often I look at the more relevant but less profitable question, "what percent of users would have had a better experience without personalization". It's always been <1%.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  I guess "less than one per cent" is a lot more than you implied in your original post, and many of the people most likely to be in that less than one percent are likely to be part of this audience here. It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".

shakna 6y ago

I get more relevant results from DuckDuckGo. Who doesn't do the personalisation to begin with. I have found personalisation doesn't work for any search product. YouTube's ranking engine won't get me what I'm looking for. Google's personalised search doesn't get me what I'm looking for, and the de-personalised whilst better, only gets me halfway there because it still tries to geo-bubble me. I am aware that what I search for makes me slightly outside the norm. All attempts to bubble me fail because of that, and turn your product into nothing more than an exercise in frustration as I try to escape the narrow roads you expect me to walk.

harha 6y ago
Being able to control the geo is one of the great features of DDG for me, especially back when I traveled a lot. The search engine doesn’t know the context I’m in (and I’m happy about that, I don’t think it should be guessing something this personal and then limiting the options for me). It also helps me search for content vs for listings, sometimes I want information on a product and not the local merchant, with Google the closest I would get was switching to news search (also not optimal).

hoistbypetard 6y ago

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. As somebody who uses search products many times a day and who has opted in to the less personalized experience in several different ways over the past several years, I can confidently assure you that I very strongly prefer the "less personalized" experience. Additionally, I don't feel like I need a shower just because I used it. Why on earth would I want you to track me more? I don't see any reason.

qwerty456127 6y ago

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. I absolutely prefer non-personalized web search results, the YouTube home page you get when you are not signed-in (and have cookies deleted) and suggestions based on the current view only (not on the previous history). I confidently assure you ;-) Obviously there are people who feel different.

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

Personally, I don't like personalization. I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her. That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search. The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize. Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.

ehsankia 6y ago
There's a bunch of anecdotal stories about personalization goes wrong, but I don't see how any of that is a strong enough point. Should you be equally given news about every local news from every city in the world? Should be equally given news about every sport and sport team? What if you don't even like any sports? Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news. I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows. Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago
  Yes what you describe is what I want. When I search I don't want my search influenced by search terms that are invisible to me and that I can't influence. If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed. What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.

chrstphrknwtn 6y ago

As someone who makes widgets, and can confidently assure you that you need widgets.

lokedhs 6y ago
I'm wondering if this assertion comes from some kind of "search bubble" among developers of these tools.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  If adding widgets to products caused the product revenue to double, then you probably wouldn't call it a bubble.
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    My previous response was probably a bit snarky. My point was that if this is something that you worked on and you realise that your revenue doubled, then it's probably very easy to justify that to oneself that this is indeed what the users want. After all, you don't hear any negative points, which is what a filter bubble is.
    - mgraczyk 6y ago
      It's not possible to truly know what they want, but it is possible to ask them. Almost all people say they want more personalized content, especially for entertainment. Those who don't want it are free to opt out. The real bubble is around the belief that products with billions of active users somehow thrive without giving users what they want.
mgraczyk 6y ago
We (and Google) run RCTs constantly, including experiments with no personalization. Users self-report higher satisfaction and NPS with personalization.

skissane 6y ago

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared. I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist

awalton 6y ago
> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions. I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)
mgraczyk 6y ago
You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`. news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.
- skissane 6y ago
  I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.) When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share" Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always

pirocks 6y ago

I have turned off personalization for several years now. I prefer it off, though admittedly I adblock, and block thumbnails etc...

actuator 6y ago

Yep, I have my main search engine on personal laptop switched to DuckDuckGo. Guess what, more often I just end up typing '!g' for finding something relevant. For US, DDG still is fine I guess for basic results like local websites. If you are traveling to other countries, notice that DDG will often give very bad results for queries with local relevance. I ran away from data collection and personalisation at the start of the last decade, but I often these days leave it on, because it just makes my life easier. Another example would be Google Photos, where letting Google run my photos through algos is very convenient because the simple feature of searching by visual context works like magic. The young privacy freak me would have been horrified if he knew this.

Semaphor 6y ago

> Try it for a month and see if you prefer it. Far longer than a month. It’s a vastly superior experience. 99% of personalization is utter shit. Having hard filters ("never these domains" on search engines, "don’t try and get me to rewatch things" or "No comedy" on Netflix) would top shitty personalization (aka. hey, I’m dumb, but please watch this) every time. edit: For me. I realize that the majority of people seem to want tech to guess/tell them what they actually wanted.

sytelus 6y ago

What would be good and bad examples where personalization excels and fails?

quicklyfrozen 6y ago
Given the generic names for a lot of things in tech, it's at least mildly useful that Google knows I'm probably not searching for info on snakes or fruit.

chottocharaii 6y ago

Lol, you can ‘confidently assure’ huh? Clicking that link, turns out I’ve had all of those personalisation features switched off for nearly a year. Don’t be so confident that your ranking/personalisation products are universally appreciated

mgraczyk 6y ago
Fortunately I have mountains of data and do not have to trust anecdote and comments. Almost all users self-report higher satisfaction and they behave in ways consistent with strongly preferring personalization.

rainbow-road 6y ago

A few months ago, I disabled all of that stuff, so that YouTube only recommends videos based on my subscriptions and liked videos. I guess it's still personalization, but it's personalization that I have control over, which seems to have drastically improved both the privacy and the quality of recommendations. I don't use Google for search, though, so I can't comment on that.

FridgeSeal 6y ago

And having disabled personalisation on a lot of products for as long as I can remember, I can confidently assure you that yes, I do in-fact prefer the non-personalised experience. I don't want it to display what some service _thinks_ I want, I want it to display what I'm asking for. No more, no less.

dijksterhuis 6y ago

I definitely prefer it.