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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment.

Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack?

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Let's try an experiment

Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago, a citation received in Chicago, A ticket to see the musical Chicago and a ticket to see the rock band Chicago.

For me I get the Rock band, citation, baseball and mass transit ticket in that order.

I'm in Los Angeles, have never been to Chicago, don't watch sports, and don't listen to the rock band. Google should know this with my location, search and YouTube history but it apparently doesn't care. What do you get?

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Or it know way too much. An alternative explanation for it could also be:

It knows you're in LA and did not look up "Chicago flight", so you probably aren't looking for flights there.

Chicago musical isn't playing in LA so probably not the right kind.

Probably why most people get parking ticket listed higher. It would be interesting to see the results in a city where the band, team or musical has an event soon.

Google tracks you to "customize search results" and I even have a 100% google'd phone (Pixel) but when I'm searching for restaurants it still shows me stuff from portland oregon instead of portland maine. This despite literally having my "Home" marked in my google account as portland maine.

Are you ignoring the ads?

My ads are:

- Flights - Chicago the Musical - Flights - More Flights

My search results are:

- Citation - Citation payment plan - News report on lawsuit regarding citations in Chicago - Baseball

I also live very far from Chicago, and the only time I was there was for a connecting flight some time in the '90s.

I get four top results for paying a parking ticket in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to.

Same here. Never been to Chicago, live in Germany.

https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB

Going deep into personalization on Google.com (answering queries using your signed in data across other google properties) feels like high risk low reward. In a post gdpr & right to be forgotten environment they know they have targets on their back. Is super deep personalization really worth getting slapped with megafines?

Where you'll see integrations like this used to be assistant, but is now bard. Both of which have lawyer boggling Eulas and a brand they can sacrifice if need be.

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