Was playing around with the new Personalized Google today. The press release states that it allows users to “pick from 216 areas of interest and create a profile so search results are filtered.”
On paper it seems like a noble goal, so off I went to create my Google profile. I selected a bunch of stuff in Arts, Computers, Business, News and Music, then as a purely vain endeavor, I typed in “highfiber” as my first search.
The only difference between the search results in Personalized Google and regular Google is that the personalized stuff have a slider at the top of each page, which lets you further sort the results. Dragging the slider all the way to right (maximum strength) sorts everything according to your preferences, forsaking all logic and rationale (basically bending the results to your iron will).
The top result on the unpersonalized default view was of course, highfiber.org, which is no surprise. Our dot-org variant has long surpassed its dot-com evil twin in terms of web presence. Other listed results included my google spoof, which was also hosted up at highfiber, and some low-fat diet type things.
Pulling the slider to maximum scrambled the results, and I watched the “highfiber.org” link slide all the way to the bottom. At the very top of the page was a link to FreeDOS.org, where some guy with a highfiber.com email address had posted something important apparently. The results are pretty hodge-podge, with links to deviantArt, aklan.com, cnn and eatonweb taking up the first 10 results.
As an experiment, I deleted all my preferences except for “News”, and ran the search again. This time, our evil twin highfiber.com was on top in the maximum personalized view. Below it were links to NMIA.com and CNN.com, which I suppose are more related to current events than our little flame-breathing community site.
I went back, deleted my “News” preference and replaced it with “Arts -> Visual Arts”. Unfortunately, Google wouldn’t show the slider bar this time around, probably because Visual Arts and highfiber.org are similar enough that you wouldn’t get different results from personalization (my theory only, could possibly be a bug).
As a final test, I checked all of the boxes under “Arts.” For some reason, I got the exact same results as when I just had “News” checked, i.e., with links to CNN, NMIA, Whoosh.org and highfiber.com. Now, I’m no search engineer, but something tells me CNN and highfiber.com aren’t exactly Arts-related. What gives, I say.
So as an addendum to my final test, I decided to help the engine along by typing “highfiber org,” and see what happens. Now I got the Whoosh.org link at the very top, which contained a reference to the seemingly ubiquitous highfiber.com. Well then. Isn’t that interesting.
Anyway, the GoogleLabs page does say this is all still in beta, so I guess there’s no point being a nitpicker. My initial opinion is that Google sort of took the preferences notion a bit too far; pulling the slider to maximum will take the “correct” link out of the top results no matter what. (By “correct”, I mean, the link that PageRank would’ve chosen by itself.) I’m not sure if I’m that adamant about having my personal preferences followed, at least not so much that it skews results so significantly.
But I’ll wait for the final version before making any conclusions.