Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...The Brave New World of Personalised Search

Personalised search sounds good. In fact, anything personalised feels good. After all it’s made just for you, specially constructed to reflect your personal tastes and interests. So what of personalised “search”, where search engines can learn about us and present back those things that interest us most? The more it knows about us, the more it can adjust our personal search results to reflect those things it knows we like best, that we believe in and that fit with our lifestyle and social group.

Google has been collecting search information for years now. It doesn’t matter if you’re signed into Google or not. It tracks searches to identify which results you click on and saves that data as part of your search profile using your IP address and downloaded cookies. Every search response (click) generates a data record. So what other information does Google know? There’s all the information we tell it. It tells you roughly where you are via the IP address location displayed on the Google home page. If you use Google Checkout, it knows your exact address too. Then there are website information it collects via Google analytics and Google GMail. And it’s not just Google; Yahoo and MSN use exactly the same techniques. With the new, Google Plus – Google’s grand entry into “social media” - it can link you to your friends to provide a new bias to search results. Does that sound too far-fetched? Bing is doing it already.

Back in May, Bing started giving users the option to plug into to their Facebook accounts to “receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends,” thus ”bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search.” To Bing’s credit, the “Facebooking” of search is opt-in (at least for now).

So what’s it all for?

Google’s not a public service whatever they might say about enhancing user search experience. It’s a business whose aim is to match advertising with user preference. Ultimately it sees the world as those who are selling (on Google) and those who are buying. Search is the marketing bait to maximise advertising revenues. And in the world of online advertising, personal data is like currency.

So what do we as marketers feel about a practice that provides the best socio-demographic targeting possible? Do we applaud it?

The answer is a resounding “no". It makes us feel deeply uncomfortable.

Can’t you switch it off?

Yesterday we tried an experiment. We ran a search on Google logged into our account with the web history option turned off. We ran the identical search on “Scroogle” that masks our IP address through proxy servers and deletes Google cookies. Scroogle uses the Google search engine but shows no ads. The results were markedly different.

Here too are some troubling comparisons that appear on Eli Pariser’s website.

And why we don’t like it

Imagine being in a human relationship where the other person always said what they thought you wanted to hear. How long would it last?

We don’t like personalised search as it narrows our options, curbs discovery, diminishes novelty and quells curiosity. It tells us what to look at based on a machine’s view of who we are and our past online behaviour. In our work, we’re continually seeking new ideas, conflicting approaches and novel discovery. We not only want to read the ideas of those whose ideas we support but those whose ideas might be opposed to our own. Human difference is the lifeblood of us all; difference stimulates interest, development and growth.

There is something more disturbing about personalised search that smacks of Huxley’s “Brave New World”. It’s about a single, powerful corporate entity deciding what we should read and what we may not see. How many steps are there before the machine decides what news and what political ideas we get to read? It gets tribal too: You may never understand the views or ideas of others outside of your social interest group. As Tim Berners-Lee puts it, “You will end up in a bubble because you will reward the search engine — you will go to the search engine — it feeds you things which you’re excited about and happy about and it won’t feed you things which get you thinking.

You will never understand as a Yankee why the Red Sox were so ‘chuffed’ to beat you a couple of years ago. As an Israeli you will never understand why you’re upsetting the Palestinian people. So, there’s danger in (personalised search)… Once you’re bracketed as somebody who buys…expensive stuff, the web won’t show you the cheap stuff and so you wont believe that the cheap stuff exists. You’ll have a twisted view of the world.”

There was a day when the major computer vendors sought to lock its customers in via proprietary architectures. The market decided it wanted openness and freedom of choice and customers voted with their feet and bought elsewhere. There’s the same real desire for openness in search as evidenced by the mass social and business movements mobilised on social media sites like Twitter, for example. We always have a choice with search as with anything else, but open, unbiased search is needed in order to know that choice exists.