Is the Loss of Objective Search a Bad Thing?

Imagine a research database, that upon searching for “wind energy,” gives top results about the benefits of turbine technology to one student, while another student (with a different search history, or in a different state) is instead shown articles that focus on the noise and vertigo that wind turbines produce. Sound fishy? Google has unveiled a more personal search that does exactly this sort of thing, called “Search, plus Your World. Is this more about advertising revenue than providing access to information? For a nice review of the issue, see a competitor’s Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! When, if ever, would you want filtered results?

January 11, 2012 by Uncategorized 3

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3 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:
    January 11, 2012 at 2:17 pm

    Filter Bubbles
    I can’t pick a side on this yet, but I do like that they’re making it easy to choose, that’s the important bit here I think!

    Reply
  2. Bibliofuture says:
    January 11, 2012 at 3:53 pm

    Filter
    Take a look at this Search Engine – Yippy.

    After you run a search it puts a list of filters on the side of the screen that you can then click on to narrow your search. For many searches by reference librarians this is a nice feature. I really wish Google would implement this.

    Here is the Wikipedia entry for Clusty. Yippy used to be Clusty. Horrible name I know. The Clusty was supposed to be based on “cluster” because it gave a cluster of results (reference to the filters)

    Reply
  3. Bibliofuture says:
    January 11, 2012 at 3:57 pm

    Related book
    Tangentially related book: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

    Reply

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