Slashdot Mirror
The Demographics of Web Search
adaviel sends a link to work out of Yahoo Research indicating that demographics can help Web searches; e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US "wagner" is a paint sprayer. The Yahoo researchers claim that by taking user demographics into account, "they managed to get the chosen link to appear as the top-ranked result 7 per cent more often than in the standard Yahoo search." New Scientist mentions this research and two other innovative adjuncts to current search practice: following the mouse cursor as a proxy for eye tracking, and taking back bearings on online criminals by studying the searches they make. (The latter raises disburbing privacy questions: would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?)
would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?
- what do you mean 'would you want', who is asking you, plebes?
You can't handle the truth.
(Yes, I'm being facetious, but still. That Wagner example is pretty awful.)
Yes, that's really what we need...
What next, a search result that depends on your religion? If you type "Origin of the Universe", you get articles about the Bible if the engine thinks you're Christian, and scientific material otherwise?
They need to understand there is little value in subjective data. Their results are already biased enough, they should take steps to fix that, not make it worse.
> Applying demographic data like this is a non-sequitur.
What would be useful is if I could choose to search from a different persons/demographic's point of view. Whether for ebay, amazon, google.
For example say I am looking for a gift for someone else. Or I am helping someone else search for stuff. Or I'm the sort of person who has rather different interests but with search keywords that overlap.
Same goes for reviews of restaurants/movies/etc. What I like, someone else may detest.
Lastly, it could also be interesting (and even beneficial) to be able to more easily see things from other people's point of view.
... not!
When I was living in France for a while (job related), I was quite annoyed by all those websites that assumed that because my computer's IP was in France I wanted to see the site in French, even if the site was a .com and I explicitly tried to click the "English" link. (My French is good enough to buy some baguettes with rillettes, but not for reading technical articles.)
This goes into the same direction: It works in many cases but when it doesn't, it will piss off the user.
... this idea smacks of a tool that's trying to be *too* helpful, and ends up getting in the way. Kinda like the old microsoft paperclip. I went and turned off this function in google accounts when I realized that my search results were being shaped based on my history, since that partially defeats my expectations of how a search engine behaves, and degrades the utility, insofar as the utility (to me the user) is based on receiving an unbiased sampling of the matches. I'm also troubled by this trend in the way that google delivers their news offerings, it seems that the logical progression of this is that we will mostly only be exposed to material that fit our highly individualized pre-existing reality bubbles.
The first thing I thought of when I read Wagner was the popular brand of jeans.
There was/are gender predictors out there that will look through your search history and try to predict what gender you are. They were mildly successful (though dead wrong in my case). I think I prefer Google's more invasive yet more accurate method of paying attention to which results I click on and giving me more of the same without regard to gender or age. I DO like getting local results though.
As far as women vs woman goes ... tsk! just think, "would I use man or men here?", and then add a wo onto the front of it, its not that hard.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
A search engine is supposed to find things which fit the regexp that you request.
Often someone will tell me in a forum to "search for x in google", what happens when the results are not exactly the same worldwide because of this technique?
Also, there are loads of people that use proxies and so on to search the web. (like people in china) Their demographics would appear all skewed because it would seem that someone in the proxy's country of origin is requesting to search for webpage x.
I don't agree with this technique at all. It just doesn't fit. Imagine if 'egrep' started filtering strings based on additional info that you could not easily control (like timezone), it would be annoying.
Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Good heavens, why was this modded Insightful? I think the poster was going for Funny. Anyhow, a quick Wikipedia search reveals that Richard Wagner lived from 1813-1883, making him a 19th century composer.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Modded insightful twice too... I guess some people can't be bothered to think for themselves and just moderate to increase whatever the current moderation is.
The search results are not just a regex matching. A modern search engine, like Google's, returns a ranked list of search results to you, and this ranking already has bias: the Pagerank algorithm sorts the results based on how popular the page is, as measured by the number of incoming links to that page. Of course, that is the general gyst of Pagerank as of the Google founders' research paper back in the late 1990s, and undoubtedly Google and other search engines have fine-tuned their algorithms since then to return "better" results to the user. But the point is still that there is already bias in the results.
Make no mistake that Google has not already thought of similar search result ranking algorithms similar to that posed in this Yahoo Research paper. The difference is that Google does not have a research arm like Yahoo, so they do not publish ideas like this. In hindsight, the Google founders were foolish to publish their Pagerank algorithm in the first place, but they were still at Stanford then.
Wagner was a 19th-century composer, not 18th.
But when I (male) search for Wagner I'm more interested in Jill than Josef or Richard.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This would not be an issue if Google simply did not save that information. Sure, I know: they say they want all that information for "targeted advertising". BUT... surveys have shown that people do not want "targeted advertising" in the first place! Despite claims of the "benefits" to consumers, turns out they're not interested if it means losing privacy.
No, blame the laziness of Americans in general to learn proper English.
Mkay?
THIS! I too have major hate of forced localization, everytime I set-up a new browser and load up Google, it goes to google.de (I'm in Germany, I speak the language well enough, but I want the content that I want, you stupid f'ing websites!). Even worse is Comedy Central and their South Park clips, an English-language blog embeds a clip from a South Park from Comedy Central, I click play, and guess what happens? The clip is dubbed in German! Aaarrrrggghhh!!!
Also trying to read myspace profiles (why, why?) gets pretty fucking irritating when it localizes the standard terms as "Favorite music", "Comments", etc, but then after the ":" displays the stuff the user's filled in, in their original language (usually English), meaning you have to read localized and then English words within the same sentence.
God damned morons all of them...
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!