Troubling Filter Bubbles in Google Search

November 26, 2012

It is another reason to love my favorite search engine, DuckDuckGo. The folks at that search site, which collects no user information and does not personalize results, ran a Google experiment and found some disturbing effects of the search giant’s results tailoring. DuckDuckGo’s Gabriel Weinberg discusses the results in his blog post, “Magic Keywords on Google and the Consequences of Tailoring Results.” I recommend skipping to the bottom of the page and watching the one-minute video, either on its own or before delving into the thought-provoking article.

The upshot: many users searched Google for the same terms simultaneously and got very different personalized results, even when logged out of their Google profiles. Weinberg reports:

“No ordering received a majority across the whole study, and several orderings were only seen by one or two people. In fact, the data only includes the top five links — if you open it up to the whole first page (usually 7-11 links) it fragments a lot more.

“We saw a lot of different links (not just orderings). And we also saw a lot of different news results within the news blocks.

“The news varied a lot. In the ‘obama’ search, news was the first link. Some people were getting Fox News while others got the LA Times and a few people got other stuff.

“Individual people often saw the same things on the off and on versions, but there was of course more variation person to person. That this tailoring exists even when making an attempt to de-personalize (signing out or going incognito) makes it impossible for an individual to pop their own Google filter bubble.”

Some folks have long been leery of Google’s personalization efforts, largely for privacy reasons. This article highlights another reason to dislike results tailoring—it takes confirmation bias to a new, insidious level. Rather than actively rejecting perspectives with which you don’t already agree, you don’t get to see them at all. So, if one is using Google to objectively research all viewpoints and develop an informed opinion. . . well, good luck with that. I’ll stick with the Duck, myself.

Cynthia Murrell, November 26, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.