I picked this book up at my office.
If you dont know what the book is about: it talks about the evils of personalization of services like Facebook and Google and how that can create feedback loops that feeds you more and more results that look similar to your own beliefs, conveniently pulling out results that the search engine does not think fits your "interests". The book maintains (correctly) that a search on Google does guarantee the same set of results for any two people anymore; it varies based on your search history, you location, your +1s of things over the internet and a number of other factors. The book also states that engineers working on search can no longer understand the whole system. While that it itself is not alarming (that is the case with most large pieces of software. My first brush with this idea came about while working at MS, where my dev manager told us that Word eventually turned so complex that no one person understood it in its entirety anymore). On that count, I think the author is simply being paranoid; that is just how complex systems work. Which individual can say that they know exactly how every single part of a laptop works? One can find people with specialized knowledge of small parts of it, but it is unlikely that any one person is going to be able to explain the mechanics involved in any random part of a laptop.
The other point I have a problem with is lack of empirical data showing evidence of the filter bubble. There are a few anecdotal evidence given in various places in the book, but there is no conclusive proof that a feedback loop is created or that it influences its users. I know that it exists, from my own first hand experience, but it would be great if it was done as a study with some numbers instead of just being anecdotes.
And here is a funny observation about Google search, from last night. We were having dinner with some friends at a restaurant when "gooseberries" came up in the conversation. My husband's friend referred to it as delicious and yummy, and I was pretty confused, because I always thought they were bitter. He then proceeded to search for gooseberries on his phone and showed me pictures of a yellow fruit that came encased like a Tomatillo. I then used my husband's phone to search for the same thing, and I got the green gooseberries that I was talking about. We compared each other's results, and were confused for a while about why they brought up different things. It got better afterwards, when they searched for sex ratios in Chandigarh being higher than that of Kerala. Apparently one lady we were with, who was from Punjab, found an article mentioning that the sex ratio for Chandigarh was higher than that of Kerala. No about to be outdone, my husband searched for the both ratios and proved that Kerala was better. The poor lady was clearly baffled and kept insisting that she too had searched on Google but had found different results :)
I have no clue whether the different results was caused by personalization. Whatever it was, it is pretty obvious that people will soon not be able to tell each other to "Go to Google, search for X and click on the nth result". When people realize that this is happening, I wonder what will happen.
To come back to the book - I found it slightly paranoid (in fact, annoyingly so), but it is a good book to read if you arent aware of the possible problems associated with personalization.
If you dont know what the book is about: it talks about the evils of personalization of services like Facebook and Google and how that can create feedback loops that feeds you more and more results that look similar to your own beliefs, conveniently pulling out results that the search engine does not think fits your "interests". The book maintains (correctly) that a search on Google does guarantee the same set of results for any two people anymore; it varies based on your search history, you location, your +1s of things over the internet and a number of other factors. The book also states that engineers working on search can no longer understand the whole system. While that it itself is not alarming (that is the case with most large pieces of software. My first brush with this idea came about while working at MS, where my dev manager told us that Word eventually turned so complex that no one person understood it in its entirety anymore). On that count, I think the author is simply being paranoid; that is just how complex systems work. Which individual can say that they know exactly how every single part of a laptop works? One can find people with specialized knowledge of small parts of it, but it is unlikely that any one person is going to be able to explain the mechanics involved in any random part of a laptop.
The other point I have a problem with is lack of empirical data showing evidence of the filter bubble. There are a few anecdotal evidence given in various places in the book, but there is no conclusive proof that a feedback loop is created or that it influences its users. I know that it exists, from my own first hand experience, but it would be great if it was done as a study with some numbers instead of just being anecdotes.
And here is a funny observation about Google search, from last night. We were having dinner with some friends at a restaurant when "gooseberries" came up in the conversation. My husband's friend referred to it as delicious and yummy, and I was pretty confused, because I always thought they were bitter. He then proceeded to search for gooseberries on his phone and showed me pictures of a yellow fruit that came encased like a Tomatillo. I then used my husband's phone to search for the same thing, and I got the green gooseberries that I was talking about. We compared each other's results, and were confused for a while about why they brought up different things. It got better afterwards, when they searched for sex ratios in Chandigarh being higher than that of Kerala. Apparently one lady we were with, who was from Punjab, found an article mentioning that the sex ratio for Chandigarh was higher than that of Kerala. No about to be outdone, my husband searched for the both ratios and proved that Kerala was better. The poor lady was clearly baffled and kept insisting that she too had searched on Google but had found different results :)
I have no clue whether the different results was caused by personalization. Whatever it was, it is pretty obvious that people will soon not be able to tell each other to "Go to Google, search for X and click on the nth result". When people realize that this is happening, I wonder what will happen.
To come back to the book - I found it slightly paranoid (in fact, annoyingly so), but it is a good book to read if you arent aware of the possible problems associated with personalization.
