Google personalized search no boon
8 February 2007, 1:11 pmI’m among the people who are unhappy that Google has decided all registered users of Google services (like Gmail) should be subjected to Personalized Search. It’s quite difficult to opt out of this feature if you don’t think it’s for you; I found instructions on several sites which didn’t work before I found more useful instructions at Nelson’s Weblog, but the user interface is confusing enough that I’m far from certain I’ve accomplished what I’ve tried to do.
Many of the people fussing about this issue are concerned about the privacy implications. I realize that Google can archive the strings I search for and the IP addresses I search from whether I’m signed in or not; I don’t have any illusion that I have any privacy from Google.
My unease about Search History is that it violates a fundamental precept of usability: it changes the behavior of a system in ways that are unpredictable and not under the control of the user.
I use Google Search for much more than looking up information; I use it to glean meta information. One simple example is seeing where a client’s website is in the search results for relevant keywords. It’s a crude but useful metric, and if searching for a client’s website inflates its standings in my search results alone, it’s not available to me any more. Another meta textual use of search is simply seeing what the most frequently referenced resource on a given topic is. Sometimes I don’t really want to know the answer; I just want to know where most web searchers look for the answer.
There’s also the issue that not all of the searching I do fits what I would think of as any single “profile.” I generally search for information in narrow technical domains at work. At home (especially around this time of year) I use search heavily in gift-shopping for products that I have no personal interest in. I really don’t want my work searches for some CSS arcana colored by my efforts to locate a birthday present for my mom.
Finally, there’s the not insignificant issue that when I select a link from a Google search results page, I don’t yet know if it’s going to be useful or not. Today my work-search self tried to research current best practices on making text in tables on web pages wrap appropriately. The first several pages I reviewed were full of terrible advice, and I’d hate to have them contribute to my profile.
I’m far too dependent on both Google Search and Gmail at this point to give up either one. I hope Google will soon realize that they’ve devalued their core product offering and reverse this decision, or at least make a transparent opt-out available. In the mean time, I’m taking pains to log out of all Google services before I search for anything.
it changes the behavior of a system in ways that are unpredictable and not under the control of the user.
You mean like every time they tweak their “regular” algorithm? The way that someone can change Google by changing something on the web? There’s not too much transparency about Google at all, ever. It’s just hard to tell as long as what you get is usally good enough, and you have no way of telling otherwise. (as someone who’s worked on search applications (with varying degrees of focus) for 8 years now, this creeping feeling that users get that they’re missing something is almost impossible to dispel. That Google has gone so long with people trusting it almost blindly is a testament to how much better their original approach was from its old competitors, but also more and more, the lack of any serious new competition).
By the way, you know we do have a mutual acquaintence who is a usability professional at Google. You should tell her.