1. How could you craft an Internet search to obtain a wider range of facts and opinions about a topic? 2. Choose a topic of interest to you and do an Internet search on it; ask several friends or classmates to do the same. Do your results differ? In what way?
6-1 Inside the Bubble: Internet Search Filters
Through Facebook, Classmates, and LinkedIn,
the Internet allows us to reach out to those
who are different from ourselves—or does
it? Today, the search engines we use to navi-
gate the Internet are personalized. Google, for
example, uses as many as 57 sources of infor-
mation, including location and past searches,
to make calculated guesses about the sites
a person might like to visit. Its searches have
been personalized in this way since 2009.
In 2012 Google carried the process one step
further by collecting information from the
websites that people “friend” through social
media, and then using that information to
direct their web searches. Google sees this
personalization of its searches as a service,
one that helps people to cut through irrelevant
information and quickly find what they are
looking for.
Although Google’s approach may at first
sound convenient, critics charge that it can
trap users in their own worlds, by routing them
ever more narrowly in the same direction. In his
book The Filter Bubble, online political activist
Eli Pariser complains that when a search engine
filters our searches, it encloses us in a kind of
invisible bubble that limits what we see to what
we are already familiar with. Thus, we are not
likely to discover people, places, and ideas that
are outside our comfort zone. Secure in our
online bubble, which we may not even realize is
there, we visit only safe, predictable sites.
What is wrong with that result? Given a
choice, most of us go only to restaurants whose
food we enjoy, read and listen to only those
books and radio programs we know we like. Yet
wasn’t the Internet supposed to open new vistas
to us? And if we are investigating a major news
event, shouldn’t we all see the same informa-
tion when we search for it? Pariser describes
what happened when two friends searched for
the term “BP” in the spring of 2010, during the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig’s accidental discharge
of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Using the
same browser, the two friends got very different
results. One saw links to information about
the oil spill; the other saw links to information
about BP’s CEO, intended for investors.
Pariser has recently raised another con-
cern: Because of the way the online world is
filtered, many if not most people filter out truly
important events Stories or in-depth research
about Afghanistan, world poverty, and the con-
tinuing refugee crisis do not get viewed much
less read. Syria and policies about new polic-
ing methods must compete in the same search
pool with cat pictures and Candy Crush and
everything else people search for online. The
solution—according to Pariser–is to figure out
how to make the truly important issues more
engaging and compelling.
One possibility, according to research-
ers at MIT and Yahoo Labs, is to include
contrasting or opposing views in online
searches. Although their work is just begin-
ning, the hope is that someday, despite the
technological challenges, the Internet will
become less isolating and more open to differ-
ent perspectives.
LET’S DISCUSS
1. How could you craft an Internet search to
obtain a wider range of facts and opinions
about a topic?
2. Choose a topic of interest to you and do an
Internet search on it; ask several friends or
classmates to do the same. Do your results
differ? In what way?
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