How Much Personalised can Google Be?
Posted on | December 6, 2009 | No Comments
In the open piece of Wall Street Journal titled ” How Google can help newspapers” , Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made a very interesting point. No, it is not regarding the ongoing Google – Newspapers revenue battle. It is about his fantasy of reading a “news gadget” that “knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read.”
Personalised search is being provided by Google to all. They will show results according to your click patterns. So, if you search for ‘Python’ in Google and regularly access pages related to reptile python then next time these pages will have more prominence than programming language python.
But news is totally a new ball game. For example. I live in Mumbai. I usually follow Bollywood news. But I am interested in top Hollywood news as well. When I say top Hollywood I mean A-listers. I am not interested stars like Tara Reid, Kim Kardishian, etc. I also would love to have a dose of what is happening in Tamil and Malayalam film industries. But only the top, creamy layer. I only want to know about the big superstars and what they are up to.
However, some of my friends are different. They might be more interested in Hollywood than any of the Indian Film Industry.
This makes personalising News a big challenge. If Google personalises too narrowly then the user might miss something that would have been of interest to him.
News is something that is to inform people what is new. Whether they like it or not. Even though you might be an ardent Linux user you still must know about Windows and MacOS development.
Kevin Kelleher writes “Google’s algorithms are very handy for shopping or entertainment recommendations. But communities are inherently hotpots of dissent. Targeting news stories as if they weI don’t like it “personalizing” news. Serving readers news based on what they’ve read can lead to a kind of tunnel vision where they’re insulated from the dissenting views and unpleasant truths. Newspapers emerged to serve communities, and core advertisements runs counter to that important service. I want a news gadget bringing me stories that make me uncomfortable.”
This kind of spoon feeding will result in people getting more and more less knowledgeable about their surroundings. This is an very interesting article about how Google is killing General knowledge “Is this where we are heading? A Google search, once you have keyed the words in, takes a broadband user less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. As for those laborious keystrokes, voice-recognition technology will enable us to bypass them. And soon pretty well everybody, from schoolchildren to drinkers in pubs, will be online pretty well all of the time. In that context, perhaps there is no longer any point in keeping facts in our heads. If you want to know who wrote “Skellig”, or whether Norway is a member of the European Union, or what Cary Grant’s real name was, you ask your laptop or your phone.”
Newspapers are something like treasure trove of knowledge. Especially, the editorials and other pages. On the top they might just seem like just news, but these news contains references and related data that might be important.”
Personalised news is good if you are short on time and you have a well defined objective about what your news should be. Like a Wall Street mogul would want all the financial and related news before the Stock Exchanges open. But I am uneasy on letting computer algorithm decide what I must read and what information must I consume.
Are you comfortable with Google deciding what you read? What is your take on this? Please do comment.
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