Two days ago I wrote an article1 about the risk of the internet presenting homogeneity to individuals as opposed to varying opinions and ‘balanced’ content in response to search.
This is a vast subject, many parts of which I am unqualified to address. The topic does fascinate me, though, especially related to searches I make about the code school industry. Increasingly biased information related to our market or my perception of it is an interesting phenomenon to think about.
For the next few weeks I’m going to try using a search engine called DuckDuckGo2, a service focused on avoiding the ‘personalized pitfalls’ of other search products. Here’s more information3:
DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the “filter bubble” of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo also emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and WolframAlpha.
See this USC Marshall article to find out how search engines work to give you results for your search queries.
I’m very interested to see how this experiment goes, especially after using tailored search for years on end.
1. Read my full post about the Internet as an echo chamber for individuals.2. Try searching with DuckDuckGo.3. Get the whole story about DuckDuckGo from Wikipedia.
