Google unveiled personalized searches for Google Plus users Tuesday in what a Medill professor said may be an attempt to take control of the site’s social media presence.
The search modification, which Google has dubbed “Search Plus Your World,” tailors searches for logged-in users by giving more priority to information drawn from their Google Plus profiles and those of their friends. Google currently accounts for 65 percent of the search engine market.
Medill Prof. Owen Youngman, who teaches the new elective class, The Media World through the Lens of Google, said the changes being made to the Google algorithms may raise questions about the accuracy of its results.
“It ensures essentially that no two people will ever see the same set of search results,” Youngman said. “What’s unclear is the implication of how we view what we get.”
Google’s personalization feature has created concerns regarding the potential for bias when searches are geared toward the interests of one specific person.
Youngman said the discussions his students had about personalized searches are making them more skeptical about the relevancy of the items coming up in their searches, as well as of the priority assigned to these results by the search engine itself.
In terms of research, personalized searches can be limited and incomplete, Youngman said.
“You should be exposed to new content and different points of view,” Weinberg senior Suzanne Kreps said. “It’s easier than ever to find new opinions, but it’s also easier than ever to isolate yourself. Pointing you to the same kinds of things as before is not really useful.”
Leslie Carruthers, president of The Search Guru, a company that works with businesses on their search engine marketing and optimization, said it was inevitable that Google would eventually become more involved in social media.
However, she added that Google Plus, now six months old, has not taken off as the company had hoped.
“Google had to do something – they had to get into the social game,” Carruthers said. “The problem with Google Plus is that not enough people are joining it. In trying to make it personalized, that’s their hook to get you to come in and use Google Plus.”
In addition, since personalized searches gather data from online profiles, some consider them to be a violation of privacy. Luke Sequeira, a student in the School of Continuing Studies, said if websites intend to utilize personal information, they should exercise “full disclosure” with their users.
“People have a right to know how their data is being compiled and what it’s being used for,” Sequeira said.
Google has already made some attempts to educate users on personal-data protection. In October, Google launched the British “Good to Know” campaign, which involves displaying ads in news publications and public places such as subway stations that aim to help users manage how their information is used by major websites. The campaign is just reaching the United States.
The introduction of personalized searches for Google Plus users follows Google’s inability to strike deals with Facebook and Twitter in accessing the vast amounts of data available on those sites, Youngman said. This can introduce more bias in terms of product placement, he said.
“They’re treating Google Plus, which is their own product, differently than Twitter and Facebook,” Youngman said.
Although gearing more toward social media may boost business, Carruthers said she logs out of any Google applications before conducting a search because she does not think personalized searches are necessarily optimized searches.
“I don’t have confidence that any organization can take that large amount of data and do much with it,” she said. “It’s too much work and it’s too overwhelming.”
Although it may be too early to gauge the success of Google’s new attempt to break into the sphere of social media, many students may ultimately decide to stick with what they know.
“People are pretty brand loyal,” Sequeira said. “Once they get used to an interface, it’s difficult to change.”
