Posts About ‘personalised search’

Yandex Leads Search Industry Towards more Personalisation

Yandex-sign

If there is one trend which has been very visible in the last few years it is personalisation on the web. The more you did on the web, the more personalised information you were getting back. It was in 2009 that Google opened up personalisation for everyone, meaning that your search results were from that point on influenced by your behaviour.

At first this was just search behaviour, but slowly that has evolved as well into social behaviour. Still if you do searches on Google, or whatever other search engine you prefer, there still seems to be a lot of flaws in the accuracy of the personalisation. This is partly because for search engines it is hard to pinpoint what it is you exactly want. It takes data to figure that out. Lots of it.

And it becomes even more difficult to personalise when your opinions change. We are all human after all and we can change our mind. Hell, we do that all the time. Russian search giant Yandex last week took another step towards perfecting personalised search, by looking at your every move, even your latest move. It was something Ilya Segalovich talked about a few weeks back at the International Search Summit. (more…)

Beware of Personalised Search! Information Dystopia and Online ‘Filter Bubbles’

The Effect of the Filter Bubble

Last year Eli Pariser spoke at TED, covering a topic that we’re all becoming increasingly affected by while navigating the web. Eli introduced his theory on the online ‘filter bubble’, explaining that through the continuous quest to ‘personalise’ search results, our online environments are becoming less and less diverse.

Hi everyone, I am Ned and this is my first (proper) post on State of Search. I’ve become fairly annoyed lately with many of the websites I visit regularly and spend a lot of time on, like: Amazon, Facebook and Google (after all, I am an SEO), that are becoming incredibly ‘samey’ places to hang out and discover information online. So much of the content that I see every day is either something I’ve already seen or, worse, nothing to do with what I was looking for in the first place! This is one of the effects that Eli refers to when talking about online ‘filter bubbles’. (more…)