Thursday, October 2, 2014

Negative public opinions of search engine personalization don't stop providers from intensifying and 'enhancing' the process!

According to this article which analyzes a recent PEW research study, 65% of people concluded that search engine personalization is a bad thing because it limits the information they are attaining. A new term, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), has been used by numerous companies such as Google and Bing in order to improve users' outlook on the tailoring of search results based on previous internet actions. Even though the average user may not even realize that their searches are being personalized, the list drawbacks of this shift seems to be endless. Eli Pariser brings up the scary evolution of a filter bubble: if search recommendations continue, our perception of the world will significantly differ from reality because we are only educating ourselves on what we're interested in. Another prominent concern is the chance of entering a "bad feedback loop" where you make one out-of-character search, and your results are then based off that outcast search for an extended period of time afterwards. Generally, as people get older, their views on SEO are more negative, as you can tell by the graph above.

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