Paul Graham, the Commons, and How Google Stopped Being Google

&#62; It isn't that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that's not what made us love Google's search engine.<p>What makes you love Google is Google giving you the right answer.<p>If you live in the US, do a google search for dmv.<p>Did it pull the one from your state?<p>Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the state the generates the most Google searches for dmv, but the California DMV is likely relevant iff you are in California.<p>This idea of one best search page for one query, independent of any other factors based on the user or users geography is really overly romantic and simplicistic.<p>On the other hand, the filter bubble stuff is a nice narrative, but it mostly makes for an interesting story rather than real problem. Having worked on search personalization at Google about 5 years ago, it's just hard to make that big impact on search results with personalization. "dmv" is a nice example where it's works brilliantly, but those ambiguous queries are pretty rare, and hence the more bread and butter stuff is still really driving most of the quality.

I feel like there's a recent anti-Google sentiment among the hacker/techie community which seems very unsubstantiated by solid reasoning or logic. The argument in particular, that search quality is getting worse, is a little lost on me because, for me or anyone I talk to at least, this is simply not true.<p>In fact, I find myself spending less and less time on "Google the Search Engine" because it's gotten so damn good at giving me the right result right away based on the simplest and vaguest keywords (I use the omnibar so I don't even go to google.com anymore). I still remember not so long ago having to try different phrasings of my search keywords a number of times before I would get the result I was looking for on the main page (or in cases of extreme frustration clicking through pages and pages of search results). This is largely not the case anymore.<p>From my general interactions with people and how they use the web, anecdotal as it may be, they simply doesn't give a shit about ads, filter bubbles and so on. Google Search hasn't changed for them in any meaningful way except that it's gotten a lot better at figuring out what they wanted to find (and in most cases they are not even conscious of that improvement over time).<p>With regards to other other free G-services (Gmail, Docs, G+, Blogger, YouTube), if you are consciously buying into them, it is implied that you know you are entering into a relationship where parts of the real-estate you're interacting with might be used to display ads and I think everyone understands and accepts that.<p>I am an avid conspiracy theorist, however, and have more long-term concerns about what happens if Google turns TRULY evil and starts to use its data to spy on citizens on behalf of some authoritarian government. But as of right now I feel a little foolish reacting to this concern in any significant way.

It reminds me of HN itself.<p>I don't want to know what the "average" likes to read, or even what people like me like to read. I want to know what smart, interesting people (not me!) like to read.<p>In other words: I want curation by an expert, not the average of everyone's inputs. Google is supposed to <i>know</i> the right answer, not ask all my friends what the answer is and report back.

this is really interesting. What People WANT and what they THINK they want are two different things...How people define and Perceive SEARCH and how they use search are two different things.<p>I think Google is facing a SELF-DEFEATING reality that as they serve people with better results, they erode the perception of their brand in peoples eyes.<p>There is clearly an incongruity between what people "THINK" they want from a search engine( and how they perceive Google) versus, what they "REALLY WANT" from a search engine.<p>Conflicting priorities are always a struggle, but this is an especially interesting one. One side has a DATA supported reality that can't be disputed about what searchers want and what puts bread on the table. On the other side is the more important, but less quantifiable reality that their BRAND is what brings searches back to the site, not the quality of the results, but the perception of GOOGLE and SEARCH being synonymous. This brand value is clearly getting diluted by delivering better results, and could in the long run be their demise.

This is a really good article. Succint, reasonably well written and interesting. That being said, one imagines that Google (despite being an advertising company) have a huge investment in the quality of search.<p>However, because they are essentially a monopoly, many people try to game the system for their benefit. This creates an arms-race, and may be one of the root causes of this personalisation. I do agree with the main point, that this could potentially make Google less useful for us all as a whole, and will probably lead to their disruption, sooner or later.

Alexis Madrigal reaches a subtle and thought provoking conclusion "The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make." This would seem to be at odds with a lot of "Big Data" evangelism but I think he is right.

This article is custom tailored for the HN echo chamber. The link to PG for this article is tenuous at best.

I agree Google has gone into a filter bubble, but the article very speculative and provides no statistics or examples to make a good point.<p>This is a pop-science article, so I don't have high expectations.

The author is prompt to admit that this is pure speculation on his part, and so we don't know how and why Google became what it is; but I find his explanation very convincing.<p>Serving personalized results to users may increase click-through rates but it degrades the idea we form of what Google is and what it does.

Its called "the filter bubble" <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s</a>

With the "old" Google, a search made me feel as though I'd stepped into the potential realm of answers to my query. The most relevant, to me, was the stuff that mapped to my query the best -- nothing more, but nothing less.<p>Now, I feel like I'm living in the law of averages. I'm not interested in the average; I want the top of the scale. I really do not want social and local and all the other unknown contexts involved in giving me what's right "for me". With all the contextual crap, I feel like now I get the "less".<p>I wish they let me have the option of turning it all off, and just going with content-based search. Of course, they have to filter out the crap that's being generated to game their search index, but outside of that -- give me what the web has.

Discovery and personalization are not compatible with each other. So if you use Google search as a discovery tool, then personalization hurts.<p>There is no alternative. Maybe DDG but results are not so good.

The Dr. Frankenstein in me loves the idea of an automated data-driven business: generic algorithm + A-B testing + payment mechanism. If you could also automate litigation... running many in parallel, a useful monster might one day emerge. Evolution has worked well elsewhere. The real problem is an exponential search space, and time/experiments needed to explore it.<p>The problem of giving people what they want is also the problem of markets and democracy in general. Fortunately for us buyers/citizens, we usually eventually realize what we really want - unfortunately for the vendor/politician catering to what we previously thought we wanted.<p>There's an appeal to Jobs' approach: make what they <i>will</i> want once they've see it. Far superior to creating/governing by numbers.

The article points out reasons as to why many of us are leaving Google for other search engines that protect our private data by not recording our search information. Startpage for instance does not track your private data. You will not have your IP address recorded or have tracking cookies put on your computer. I know we now live in a world where it is difficult to get away from Google altogether. It seems like they want to collect data on everybody in various ways. However, many of us are beginning to try. My gmail account may be the next to go.

The "personalization" of the web is not a Google-specific phenomenon. I am, at this very moment, sitting in a session at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit where a marketer from Toyota is espousing personalizing site content to users.<p>This practice is being pushed _hard_ to all businesses here as a central theme of growth of the internet. In the sense that this drives better business, it certainly will be. Don't expect to go to Toyota.com and see the same experience as your neighbor anymore.

Does anyone know an easy way to prevent Google from tailoring my search results based off my location? I don't want to use a proxy, because then the results would just be tailored to that (false) location.

What I find fascinating is that with the sheer unlimited amount of data they have the quality of their search engine results have been stagnating for almost 10 years and no substantial break through been seen so far.<p>The only somewhat "break through" could be seen in local searches - and saving people from adding their zip code, city or street name to their search phrase seems to be not that much impressive either.

It's nice to romanticize what Google might've once been, but at the end of the day Google is a tool that provides a service. To have a qualm regarding the current user experience is a different story, but in terms of the delivery of sought after content I don't think one could argue they have taken steps anywhere but forwards.

At first search signals were mainly provided by the content itself and now signals from the user are being incorporated.<p>There is already an established term for this and it’s not “filter bubble” or “tailoring” the term is “relevance” and it’s the core of search.<p>If the author is suggesting that data about a user’s identity, history, and location isn't usefully to providing her with the best possible results then he should stick to writing about stuff he actually comprehends and not be the umpteenth author resorting to use “Google” in the title to whore traffic.

&#62;<i>"They make changes to the user interface and collect more data, analyzing what they've got to see what users "liked" more."</i><p>I find this so utterly naive that I am incredulous.<p>Google is a business. They don't tweek results based in favor of user preferences.<p>They tweek results based on the amount of revenue they are likely to bring in.<p>It's not an accident that [in the US] <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=weather" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=weather</a> provides top links to commercial advertizing driven sites for one's local weather and only portals into the main page of weather.gov rather than the local forecast page.<p>Google search results aren't the best possible for the most people. They are the worst tolerable for maximizing revenue.<p>[edit] do employees have to use 20% time for downvoting on HN or is it part of their job?