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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

> should we eliminate it as a source of truth?

From my point of view, Google eliminated itself long ago: it's already intentionally very biased, distorting the reality by design, different to every of its users: adjusting the "algorithm" to return to the seeker what the seeker would click the most and also what the Google's marketing would like to present, even to the point of intentionally ignoring the very words you entered in the search(!).

Just try to find somebody with whom you seriously disagree on some topic then ask him/her kindly to "google" the same terms related to that topic and to let you see what he/she sees. Compare.

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I know you already say that is your point of view, but I think this very much in the eye of the beholder. I very much like this personalization and it makes it easier to find things I'm looking for. E.g. when I search `latex` I don't want to find latex bodysuits, I want results about LaTeX and I expect Google to know that.

That said, it would be nice if there was an easy way to turn off this search personalization on a search-by-search basis in a similar manner to how one can look for results from a certain time period

If you just speak about the positive aspects, you obviously never compared what you surely know to be truth, related to some "controversial" topic, with what some other people get when they search for the same topic, especially those who have different opinion of what "the truth" is.

Not counting that even that "magnification of the confirmation" is additionally modified for some topics by the "editorial" policies of Google.

> That said, it would be nice if there was an easy way to turn off this search personalization on a search-by-search basis

it is, it's called anonymous window

You are talking about incognito mode / private browsing right?

When I open an incognito tab and search for “latex”, the entire first page of results is still all about LaTeX for me and I would bet my left hand that this is not universally true.

In other words, you are still seeing personalized results.

Yup, I tried the same thing. I would guess they are still doing some sort of server-side personalization and/or identification, they just don't continue to track you via cookies. For me it wasn't that surprising, I tried doing this from an IP address associated with a large CS dept.

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