I didn’t know about filter bubbles till last week. I have clearly been existing in a happy bubble unaware of the potential implications of Google’s algorithms generating / tailoring a reality just for me. I do like all the personalization that comes with Google now but hadn’t really thought about potential flip-sides. Nothing like a TED talk to open your eyes:
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
Google will customize results based on a person’s search history, which can give you biased search results (called the “filter bubble”).
There is a good article on Google’s Mr Search, Amit Singhal in the Guardian (Adams, 2013):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/19/google-search-knowledge-graph-singhal-interview
This article also highlights different options on search engines e.g. DuckDuckGo which searches the web without filtering results based on previous searches.
Another Google response to this can be found here
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-bubble-response-13591.html
But I’m off to Google the knowledge graph…
