Google Using Recent Search Activity to Influence Results

George Nguyen reports on Google tracking recent search activity .

-DD

Promoting Civil Society

Kirk J. Schneider and Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi suggest that a massive initiative to create mindfulness and dialogue is needed to preserve our security and freedoms. They commend the work of Better Angels, which offers structured dialogues between conservatives and liberals.

My own take is that much of today's incivility is a competitive "team" culture, where the individual is socially motivated to support their "gang" even to the point of supporting (even engaging in) repugnant behavior. In that case, a national draft which caused diverse individuals to work together may have more impact than an intellectual dialogue.

-DD

Google and Filter Bubbles

DuckDuckGo reports that Google users tend to find themselves in filter bubbles due to Google's personalization of what they see.

-DD

Worldview Distortion

Michael Dougherty rants about filter bubbles resulting from Internet news and opinion sites.

-DD

Digital Polarization

Lee Bessette writes about digital polorization , and specifically the Polorization Initiative.

-DD

Contextual Advertising and Filter Bubbles

Mike Elgan comments on how we have exchanged our privacy for poorly executed contextual advertising .

-DD

 

Voice Recognition Being Pursued With Neural Networks

Sharon Gaudin reports on the work of Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist for the search engine Baidu. Ng is developing neural networks which should allow computers to interpret human spoken requests accurately . The goal is to allow people who cannot afford traditional computers data retrieval capabilities over their mobile phone.

A concern about a search engine as your primary information source is that filter bubbles can develop, either due to the algorithm being used, or due to selected presentation by the database company.

-DD

 

Bubbling

The May 2 New York Times ran an article by Kate Murphy titled "How To Muddy Your Tracks On The Internet." This was my introduction to the verb "bubbling," which she defines as "the filtering of search results based on your search history."

This term appears to be derived from Eli Pariser speaking out against Google's practice of displaying only those results that your history indicates you would be interested in, which causes two people doing identical searches to obtain differing results. He gave a TED Talk on this subject exactly one year before Murphy's New York Times article, titled "Beware Online 'Filter Bubbles'."

-DD