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Comment by chris_f | Hacker News Reader

>It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him..."

That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling.

I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google makes more align with your brothers perspective.

I am the creator of one of the search engines [0] named in the post. It will return the same exact organic results no matter who you are or what your prior searches were. Feel free to give it a go with your brother and see how it compares for both of you. For organic results, it works like DuckDuckGo does with Bing, but the difference is the main source of our organic results are actually from Google.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/

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You can use a pejorative if you want, but context is quality. Context-free searching is dumb and the results are bad. An example: if I search for "2020 Honda Insight EX" on Google, I see some mixed bag of stuff about my car. If I then search for "tires" -- no other terms, just tires -- Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car. There are important inputs to my search result that I didn't have to type.

Now go to DDG and search for "tires". Useless results only. All advertisements and commercial results, but nothing relevant to me. "Getting out of my filter bubble" did not help me in this use case.

>Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car

That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].

So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.

I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.

[0] https://tiresize.com/tires/Honda/Insight/2020/

However, when you change car, or happen to have many, or switch interest from buying a car for your family to learn about tires manufacturing process, then madness is ensured.

I bought a large refurb iPad Pro and pencil this spring. Presumably a high value segment, since YouTube, amazon and google keep on pushing me iPad related ads and content for months now, for things I have already bought, out of my own research.

I guess I’ll have to fake some baby related purchases to have their focus changed.

I have yet to find a case where "profiling" benefits me, as a user.

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