What Google is Hiding

[maxx]

Eli Pariser speaks about what is happening to the internet.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser...r_bubbles.html

A review of Eli Pariser's Book the Filter Bubble by 350.org organizer Bill McKibben:
"You spend half your life in Internet space, but trust me—you don't understand how it works. Eli Pariser's book is a masterpiece of both investigation and interpretation; he exposes the way we're sent down particular information tunnels, and he explains how we might once again find ourselves in a broad public square of ideas. This couldn't be a more interesting book; it casts an illuminating light on so many of our daily encounters."

[Jimaz]

This has been bugging me for years.

I used to be a big fan of the Alta Vista search engine. It had a Boolean mode that pretty much guaranteed that if you were capable of articulating a precise search query you'd get anything and everything you wanted in the results and absolutely nothing else. Their spiders may have introduced biases but you couldn't expect Alta Vista to know what it couldn't know of.

Then Google bought Alta Vista and dumbed it down to Google's "one size fits all" level. It was optimized for the vast majority of people who didn't want to be bothered with having to learn a precise query language.

So here we're seeing how Google is silently modifying our queries depending on who it thinks we are and what it thinks we want. Do they offer a way to switch that feature off? Why not?

In database systems you need the kind of assurance that Alta Vista once delivered. On the Internet you need that assurance even more.

We used to have it. Where did it go?

[maxx]

Are you talking about getting references to certain websites? You can just include the website in your query. That's how I can find the BBC article about Mike Persinger's god helmet amid the mound of rightwing denial articles.

[jcole]

You can still Boolean search on Google; I just did a simple "-- detroityes.com" for Garwood Mansion and eliminated all references to this site.
Just craft a boolean search, enter in in the bar and try it

[Jimaz]

Yes, I understand how to use both of those Google features. My complaint about Google is that even those features give biased results as is described in the OP. If there's any way to shut off that bias, I'm all ears!

The old Alta Vista didn't try to "help" you. It gave you exactly what you requested—no more, no less.

[jcole]

Yes, I understand how to use both of those Google features. My complaint about Google is that even those features give biased results as is described in the OP. If there's any way to shut off that bias, I'm all ears!

The old Alta Vista didn't try to "help" you. It gave you exactly what you requested—no more, no less.

Yes, and that was 'back in the day' when the common person didn't use the internet or computers to any great extent; now, there is a need to simplify most aspects of the web so the untrained masses can get around easily.
I'm sure there is some Boolean search engine out there somewhere for those who prefer Unix to Windows and wish that the web was still Arpanet.

Here's one: http://www.boolify.org/