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Measuring the "Filter Bubble": How Google is influencing what you click
Over the years, there has been considerable discussion of Google's "filter bubble" problem. Put simply, it's the manipulation of your search results based on your personal data. In practice this means links are moved up or down or added to your Google search results, necessitating the filtering of other search results altogether. These editorialized results are informed by the personal information Google has on you (like your search, browsing, and purchase history), and puts you in a bubble based on what Google's algorithms think you're most likely to click on.
The filter bubble is particularly pernicious when searching for political topics. That's because undecided and inquisitive voters turn to search engines to conduct basic research on candidates and issues in the critical time when they are forming their opinions on them. If they’re getting information that is swayed to one side because of their personal filter bubbles, then this can have a significant effect on political outcomes in aggregate.
This is a moderately long read, as web pages go. IMO, it's well worth the time.
The code that we wrote to analyze the data is open source and available on our GitHub repository.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/filter-bubble-study
duckduckgo-filter-bubble-study-2018_participants.xls contains the instructions we sent to each participant, as well as basic anonymized data for each participant.
https://duckduckgo.com/download/duckduckgo-filter-bubble-study-2018_participants.xls
duckduckgo-filter-bubble-study-2018_raw-search-results.xls contains a separate sheet for search results per query and per mode (private and non-private). The results are listed as they appeared on the screen for each participant, showing both organic domains and infoboxes such as Top Stories (news), Videos, etc.
https://duckduckgo.com/download/duckduckgo-filter-bubble-study-2018_raw-search-results.xls
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 16 2018, @07:44PM
"In fact, it's simply not possible to use Google search and avoid its filter bubble." 'Nuff said.
google search has become totally useless for me.
search for linux configuration stuff results in results that are 3 years old (or more) and are mostly irrelevant.
maybe my google-Fu sucks?
or maybe it's because all cookies are deleted after closing the tab with gogole search, adsense is blocked on dns level and i never surf around whilst logged in.
my guess is that the web-page creating times are over and the growth of newly created pages has declined massively, leading to the situation where google can index the web faster then new pages are added.
but because somebody is a hardcore database junky at google, the mission is not accomplished and the new goal is to index each and every unsuspecting user (and their behavior) in a google database.
the mission probably remains to sell as much ads as possible and to be able to show that
A) they haven't just indexed the web
but
B) all the users also.
"google, where every user gets their own personal database"(tm)