Personalization can, however, fail. I have a German IP address which causes Google to show me predominantly German search results. That’s not what I want at all most of the time.

There are ways to sort of get around that but they are cumbersome and they don’t always work right.

Google is pretty good at figuring out what to show you depending on the language of the search terms you are using. When there are German words in my search query Google will show me predominantly German results. That’s to be expected, that’s what I want. The problem is that Google seems to use my location (IP address, maybe also the language of the interface and whether I’m using google.de or google.com) and override that behavior so that even if I’m using english words in my query it will nevertheless show me predominantly German results.

I'm gonna humbly disagree. There are many potential ranking factors in a search result: how well the query matches the document text, how important that text is in the document, how important the document is (PR) and so on. What I don't necessarily want is further ordering by what a machine thinks is my political inclination or world view.

But probably more than 80% of the users do want that.

edit: speaking of bubbles :D

"Personalization is just a different term for relevant results"

Fine. It's not a "filter bubble", it's "excessive personalization", and it's still bad.

Arguing about what it's called doesn't do a thing to change whether or not it exists, or whether or not it's a real problem.

Is it actually excessive, though? You're just assuming that it's a real problem without any evidence to support that it is.

Read my last paragraph carefully; I'm just pointing out the name doesn't matter, it's a real phenomena that doesn't go away by changing the name.

My personal stance is actually a great deal more nuanced, which is that you can't not be in a bubble. It is mathematically impossible. Any way of slicing the torrent of information coming at you constitutes a bias. The entire idea of "piercing the bubble" is an instance of English misleading you, it's a concept without a referent. The question is not how to "escape" the bubble, the question is how do we choose our bubble?

So filtering/personalization is always present; we entirely agree on that point. Is it excessive, though? If it's not excessive, then, almost by definition[1], it's not a problem - or at least is not a major one. There is actually a huge difference between "personalization" and "excessive personalization", which was what I was trying to get at.

(Also, paragraph != sentence)

[1] Excessive meaning "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable".

A paragraph may legally consist of one sentence. It may legally consist of one word in some cases.

You seem to be trying to draw me into defending a point I'm not making. I'm making a much more subtle one, which is that you can't escape being in a bubble (not the bubble, which I initially typed, because there isn't the bubble, there's all kinds of them), so in a way arguing about whether it's "excessive" isn't even the right dimension to argue on; the filter bubbles simply are. (Not "simply ar excessive", simply are; they simply exists regardless of whether they are excessive or desirable or anything else.) The question is, what should be done about that fact, rather than how do we prevent that fact from being true, and to be honest I'm rather ambivalent about the answer to that question, because the answer is dominated more by your preconceptions and pre-existing goals than anything interesting.

I really should just blog this up.

I would agree with you if there was a button I could click to turn it off. Their algorithms aren't infallible by any means. Plus, ultimately they are a business and trying to sell, so they are going to eventually skew results towards things they think I may be willing to buy, rather than things I want to know. I think G is more susceptible than MS, but only because MS does make a living selling other stuff.

I'm not saying it's evil or wrong, just that if my first results don't appeal to me, a simple measure that might work for me would be to turn the filter off. Anyway, they could learn more about me if they let me do that.

Turn off personalization by adding "&pws=0" to the end of your search url on Google. You can also use incognito mode in Chrome.