First Monday, Volume 16, Number 2 – 7 February 2011
Web search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information online effectively. As the range of information, context and users of Internet searches has grown, the relationship between the search query, search interest and user has become more tenuous. Not all users are seeking the same information, even if they use the same query term. Thus, the quality of search results has, at least potentially, been decreasing. Search engines have begun to respond to this problem by trying to personalise search in order to deliver more relevant results to the users. A query is now evaluated in the context of a user’s search history and other data compiled into a personal profile and associated with statistical groups. This, at least, is the promise stated by the search engines themselves. This paper tries to assess the current reality of the personalisation of search results. We analyse the mechanisms of personalisation in the case of Google web search by empirically testing three commonly held assumptions about what personalisation does. To do this, we developed new digital methods which are explained here. The findings suggest that Google personal search does not fully provide the much-touted benefits for its search users. More likely, it seems to serve the interest of advertisers in providing more relevant audiences to them.
2. The rise of the personalised search engine
3. Methodological considerations
4. Description and discussion of research methods
5. Research findings: The ambiguities of personalisation
6. Conclusion and further questions
Google’s mantra is ‘to give you exactly the information you want right when you want it’ . They operationalize this by providing ‘personalised’ search results and recommendations. This is achieved on the one hand through logging of interactions whenever a person uses one of the many Google services and on the other hand by techniques such as collaborative filtering to generate group and user profiles based on which Google produces ‘personalised’ search results and recommendations (Stalder and Mayer, 2009).
Such a situation raises a number of profound questions
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