Personalized Search Opacity - CircleID8 December 2009, 1:39 pmPersonalized Search Opacity
CircleID
Google announced Friday that it would now be "personalizing" all searches, not just those for signed-in users. If your browser has a Google cookie, unless you've explicitly opted out, your search results will be customized based on search history.
Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land, wonders why more people aren't paying attention:
On Friday afternoon, Google made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned. Maybe Google timed its announcement that it was personalizing everyone's search results just right, so few would notice. Maybe no one really understood how significant the change was. Whatever the reason, it was a huge development and deserves much more attention than it has received so far.
I agree this is a big deal, even if it's only the next step in a trend begun by customized search for signed-in users years ago. And except for here, I won't even mention the P-word, "privacy." Because on top of the implications of storing all a user's search history, I wonder about the transparency of personalized search. How do we understand what search looks like to the world as it gets sliced up by history, location, and other inferences search providers make about their searchers?
...
We also have some degree of trust that search isn't systematically discriminating against particular pages or providers for undisclosed reasons. When Google received copyright takedown demands from the Church of Scientology years ago, prompting it to remove many links to "Operation Clambake," Google sent the takedowns to Chilling Effects and linked them from its search pages so searchers could see why the search had apparently become more pro-Scientology in its results.
links and more at
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20091208_personalized_search_opacity/
