3 ms·
Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.
by golly_ned 22d ago
Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.
- rmunn 22d agoIt means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put together enough clues to figure out your identity even without your Google login cookie). Yes, the fact that they could do it does not prove that they were doing it, not right away. I ditched them as soon as I found out that they could do it, because I was absolutely certain that eventually, they would end up doing it. And I wanted neutral search results, not biased ones, even ones biased towards my own point of view.
- rileymat2 22d agoI subscribe to The New York Times, if I am searching for a news event, I’d appreciate a site that’s not paywalled and I trust be the first result if it is reasonable.
- CobrastanJorji 21d agoThe NYT watches an event like Trump making a crowd of supporters swear to "cheat like hell" and to vote even if they're not registered, and they turn it into headlines like "Trump leads supporters in a pledge to vote." They are no longer a reliable source of accurate information.
- rileymat2 20d agoI am misunderstanding, I am seeing direct quotes, is it an unserious the tone that’s not in the article? Because they seem to be reporting his words accurately.
- Brian_K_White 22d agoAnything that isn't repeatable is by definition unreliable.
- encomiast 22d agoRandom number generators notwithstanding.
- taneq 22d agoThey’re unreliably unreliable.
- wombatpm 22d agoSame seed gives the same sequence. Use that to debug Monte Carlo simulations all the time.
- Brian_K_White 22d agoThe definition of "not repeatable" or unreliable in an rng is if it was random sometimes, and predictable other times.
- mcv 22d agoHow u reliable personalised search results are depends on who controls the personalization and for what purpose. I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.