The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give you what you want, which might be information, or it might be discussion, or polemics, or gossip. If you want to learn about some topic that has some element of subjectivity, familiarize yourself with the different points of view and read the writing of whoever you are interested in. There are lots of tools on the Internet to facilitate this -- Wikipedia, for example, is built around an ideal of giving people an objective survey of different things. If you type "climate change" or "Barack Obama" into Google and form an opinion based on the top results then fuck you.
The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give you what you want
The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give us what we asked for. Unless they developed mind-reading technology, Google doesn't really know what I want and attempts at guessing it will lead to substandard results.
*-- Wikipedia, for example, is built around an ideal of giving people an objective survey of different things.
A website where any amount of divergent opinions get edited down to a single article on the subject (target of edit wars and well-known editorial biases) is hardly "an objective survey of different things."
The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give us what we asked for. Unless they developed mind-reading technology, Google doesn't really know what I want and attempts at guessing it will lead to substandard results.
I think you really hit the crux of the issue here. My opinion is, these search engines are built around the UI paradigm of "type something into the box and go find that thing." The user doesn't have one box for finding discussion forums, one box for finding blogs that have people they agree with, one box for finding material that appeared in print publications, etc, and yet search engines are for finding all these things, if you want them.
As long as there's people typing "climate change" into Google, Google has to guess at what they are asking for because there ain't enough bits in the query to tell it. There's no a priori reason to expect that they are asking for the most informative and accurate links covering a wide variety of perspectives on climate change; many people probably aren't.
Regarding Wikipedia, well, that's why I said it was the ideal. You're never going to crowdsource perfect objectivity and truth from a million biased writers with ulterior motives, but they try, and they do an OK job on many topics.
The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give you what you want. I think this is fairly noncontroversial.
What is controversial is whether "what I asked for" is a better approximation of that, or whether "what Google's model of me indicates I really want" is a better approximation.
I can't say which one wins for you, right now; but it's clear that this hinges on the accuracy of the model--which is one reason privacy and usability are at odds.
How to do I know what filters form the top results if they aren't transparent? What would lead you to believe that familiarizing yourself with a different point of view would take you down a meaningfully different path through the search graph? None that I can see. Every search has a non-objective filter. The original page rank is one such. What would be useful is to make the tree obvious and manipulable as a separate object itself.
I agree that it would be cool to expose the different criteria that Google (for instance) is using to help reorder your results, to the degree that those criteria can be discretely identified, but I'm not surprised that they don't; that's a pretty significant portion of their secret sauce they would be publicizing.
I also don't think that mere transparency would really help solve any search engine "filter bubble" problem, if such a thing is real. Nothing would make Joe Google User take five minutes off whatever he came to search for to fiddle with some tree full of sliders on his result page.
Agreed. I wouldn't either 80% of the time. But often I'm making a very directed search that I would really like the "best" results for where best is usually defined as different than the results I'm getting.
Hey, check this out, Google already sort of does it. I didn't know that (probably because I have "web history" turned off, so I don't get customizations.)
When the filters themselves aren't transparent, it is a major issue.
I would gladly prefer a "pre-filtered" list, as long as I could tweak it. For example, if I'm searching for viewpoints that don't correspond with my political views, it'd be nice to be able to find those by disabling the "political bent" filter based on personalization.
To not do so is to constantly wear rose-tinted glasses... pleasant, but ultimately, dangerous.
