Web Bubbles

"It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." ~Eric Schmidt, Google


This quote refers to a current movement on the internet that doesn't have a name yet, but more and more websites with comprehensive contents are doing: filtering search results to a person's best interests defined from the user's past search history. Search engines aren't just a "give keyword, display results" thing now, but more of a multi-dimensional "personality reader" based on various algorithms that filters out search results. 


Take YouTube, for example. On the front page there is a section displaying videos that you may be interested in based on your past viewed videos. Amazon.com displays products on the front page that has relation to a past product that you may have bought. Perhaps most of all, news sites and search engines are not displaying results that it thinks you might not be interested in based on past search history. In the video an example was displayed between two people with different interests and what their results for the keyword "Egypt" looks like on Google. One had results about the uprising in Egypt, and another about vacations in Egypt. Honestly which seems more important? A civil uprising that could change the lives of millions of people or a person's own interests? 


I think any websites that does some sort of filtering in their results should 1. tell the users that they are filtering their search results based on what their interests may be and 2. offer options to remove the feature, because I believe the filtering isn't bringing people together, but rather slowly segregating them.