There's definitely a scale I think — showing me local pizza places is great. What about guessing my budget & ruling out places it thinks I won't book? That's getting into a grey area & personally I'd find that uncomfortable/undesirable.

What about applying it to non-transactional stuff like news? Should it personalise results based on what it thinks I like?

Again with subjective/objective distinction — I know my friend will tailor movie recommendations to me based on mutual interests / past discussions.

I expect though that a library catalogue would point me to the same info on global warming no matter who I am.

The trouble at the moment is that Google is conflating these two types of interaction & the user doesn't know which of their queries are personalised (and to what extent / based on what criteria).

> How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line?

In my opinion, this is the crux of it — are we happy with algorithms filling this blank unfettered, based on their own learning. If not, it's something that we have to discuss and agree on, and then enforce / bring visibility to.

At present, Google aren't negligent (legally anyway, as we haven't set any bar) and may not be acting maliciously. But if we think change is necessary (at least for visibility of what's happening under the hood), we need to ask the questions around these services to drive that change

Sometimes you just want the top results by PageRank, like in 1998 when Google was miraculous. I don't know how to get that anymore. I want information from out in the world - I generally don't want the contents of my own head reflected back at me.

> As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant.

My takeaway is that the whole thread of the first comment should be collapsed, which is usual for HN. Important topics get ignored or derailed.

pg once joked that Google's philosophy on search is the same as Scientology: What's true is true for you.

In our case, I just think it's interesting that my webdev friend was trying to ascertain truth about the world -- "is she associated with the project she worked on?" -- and the answer came up "yes!" for her even though it was "Nope" for the rest of the world.

Sure, it's an interesting question of which tradeoffs they should make. But as users, it's not really our responsibility to be concerned about that. All we know is that Google is acting a bit strangely.

To be clear, if Google stayed how it currently is, I'd have no problem at all. I'm just worried that google can go from strange to malicious at the flip of a switch. It's unsettling that they're the only realistic option. DDG has been picking up steam, but hopefully they'll do more than nip at Google's heels.

This was actually a problem for me recently. I just wanted to know the options for restaurants in an area of London. I didn't want results specific to me, I wanted all of the restaurants. I ended up not using Google since it just wouldn't give me the simple information I was looking for. Googles becoming less and less useful as time goes on, which is a real shame as they were excellent 10 years ago.