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‘The promise – and peril – of personalisation’
Aug 18th
One day, Eli Pariser (an online organiser) logged onto Facebook to find out what people with less liberal opinions than his own were talking about. He couldn’t find them. Based on his past search and click behaviour, Facebook had simply edited them out.
Since then, Pariser has gone on to write The Filter Bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Speaking recently at the RSA in London, he spoke about his concerns about the filters and algorithms that shape the way the internet is presented to us. The internet, it seems, is not as ‘connective’ as he once thought it could be.
Companies recognised that there was money to be made in helping people sort through enormous data torrents. This led to a focus on ‘relevance’ as manifested in, for example, Amazon’s ‘if you liked this, you might like that’ concept. And these filter algorithms do more than that. They can make inferences from seemingly unrelated data and are responsible for creating a ‘web of one’ in which results are no longer ‘universal’ but rather based on our own search history. This ‘filter bubble’ feeds our human confirmation bias by presenting to us the world as we already see it.
The problem is that in our personal bubble views, we don’t know what we are missing. It is relatively easy to know the editorial or political slant of a newspaper but not the unseen filters of social media. And this matters when social media is driving approximately 50% of the traffic to online news sites. It’s easy for challenging stories to be lost from view amongst the stream of ‘likes’.
We need to move on from narrow relevance and be challenged in our world view. It’s not easy to achieve this but the first stage is to be aware – and to make others aware – that this filter bubble exists.
Google and Yahoo announce 2010 top search terms
Dec 12th
Yahoo’s Year in Review reveals that the top 2010 search was for the BP oil spill. This is the only news event in the top ten, with the other places being taken by a mixture of media and pop icons (Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber) and technology (the iPhone is in sixth place). There are some interesting top tens on Yahoo’s Year in Review blog. In a top ten of US ‘obsessions’ the political movement the Tea Party appears in 8th place, one place behind bedbugs (with the iPhone taking the number one slot). Rather depressingly the top UK search terms were ‘lottery’ followed by ‘job centre’ and, in third place, ‘weather’.
Meanwhile, Google’s microsite Zeitgeist show the fast risers and fallers of 2010 (chatroulette and iPad are fast risers; swine flu and Susan Boyle are fast fallers). Google Zeitgeist also has regional results. ` In the UK, the general election dominates the top ten news searches. In France, Cheryl Cole is number seven in the fast rising people and Super Nanny is second. Justin Bieber seems as popular in Europe as he is in the States – he is a top people search in Sweden, France and Norway. The Google microsite has some interesting graphics. Using the timeline function, you can watch interest in, for example, the football World Cup, build up before and during the event.
Google’s New Search Engine Results Page Examined
May 13th
Google has rolled out a major set of changes to its search engine results pages. Left-hand navigational search facets are now turned on by default. Greg Notess examines the changes in detail in today’s Infotoday NewsBreak.
Update on Alternative Search Engines
Apr 29th
Paula Hane updates on “evolved search engine” LeapFish and semantic search engine hakia, and provides links to useful recent coverage from Information Today and other resources.
British Library Announces UK Web Archive
Mar 23rd
The British Library recently announced the launch of the UK Web Archive, which will store and make accessible every site in the .uk top-level domain. The project will deploy an impressive array of text-mining and analysis software - Avi Rappoport reveals the details in Information Today’s Newsbreaks.
Google’s UK MD gives evidence to MPs: “Google is not a parasite”.
Dec 4th
Matt Brittin, Google’s UK MD, gave evidence this week to the UK government inquiry into the future of local media and denied accusations that Google is a “parasite” on traditional newspapers. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport inquiry is examining the impact of digital convergence, new media technology and changing consumer behaviour on the UK regional newspaper industry.
Brittin described Google as a “virtual newsagent”, and noted that publishers can choose not to have their content indexed if they wish. At the same time he acknowledged that the economics of newspaper publishing are now very different from the time when the only place to advertise was the local paper. “Online everybody needs to experiment”, he commented, praising regional newspaper publisher Johnston Press’s recent decision to test paywalls on some of its local papers.
He also spent some time explaining the new restrictions which allow publishers to limit clickthroughs from Google News to their subscriber-only content.
Brittin maintained a careful distinction between the revenue models of Google News compared to Google web search, the nuances of which might have been lost on the MPs who were grilling him. It’s a fine line, and it’s easy to paint Google as being responsible for the current woes of the newspaper industry. As Brittin point out, though, Google delivers 100,000 clicks per minute — that’s 4 billion clicks per month — to news websites worldwide. Not quite the stuff of pantomime villains.
Video of the entire session is here.
