Is there any reason you wouldn’t want to see search engine results that reflect your own particular interests and tastes?
That’s the question raised by Google’s announcement today that it will personalise all search results from now on unless users actively opt out. That means, as Danny Sullivan explains, if you tend to click on Amazon in the search results, Amazon is likely to feature higher in the results you see in future.
Developments like this quite naturally prompt a knee-jerk concern: Does this mean they’ll be keeping or using information about individuals in new ways? Isn’t this another step in the creeping erosion of online privacy?
In practice, though, it’s hard to see how this development makes things worse. Google already collects and holds six months’ worth of data about your searching habits, thanks to a cookie it places in your browser.
In future, it will use that data to shape some of the results it returns when you do certain queries. The data itself stays on Google’s servers and can’t be accessed by the user, so there’s no way to tell how or why the company has come up with the particularly results its serves up.
So, if the results are more likely to match your particular interests, what’s not to like?
One concern is long term: over time, will this addition of a personal filter to the Web lead to a self-fulfilling cycle that reinforces a users current interests and prejudices? If you are served up the same information sources repeatedly, how do discover anything new?
Also, like everything about Google, the “black box” nature of the service only adds to the doubts. How heavily weighted the personalisation will be is not something Google will discuss. Will it be used only to shade a few search results, or will it lead to two users seeing drastically different sets of results for the same query?
Another potential issue Google faces is perception. If the results feel too eerily personal it could create the feeling that Google is looking over the user’s shoulder, and serve as a constant reminder of how much data the company holds.
Yet Google thrives on the pursuit of ever-greater relevance. It knows that its users want more relevance in the results they see, not less, and personalisation offers one of the most promising ways of achieving that. This is a powerful tool: it just needs to tread carefully in how it applies it.
