So, now Google thinks it knows me. Even when I’m not logged in to one of their products. Well, Google, I’m not happy about this and I don’t want you deciding what I see and when.
Obviously Google has a massive influence on what we see on the internet these days and as the number one search engine in the UK, that’s unlikely to change, but I have to object to them taking all the fun out of search as they seem to be doing with this personalized search yoke.
If I’m searching on Google (or any other search engine for that matter) I will have some idea of what I’m looking for and I might be in one of three key search modes; navigational- getting to a site whose domain I’ve forgotten, transactional- researching with intent to make a purchase, or information search- just looking to find out something to enhance my own knowledge. I might be looking for a recipe, I might be looking up the answer to a trivia question to settle an argument.
What I expect from Google in return is a set of relevant search results based on content from the whole of the world wide web. I don’t care what I searched for recently or what Google thinks I’ll like best. I want to decide. I am a moody searcher and my mood swings shall decide whether I’m looking for something old or something new.
When any user searches, they normally have some idea of what they want to find. There is obviously a big difference between someone looking for an apple phone and an apple pie recipe and Google can easily distinguish between simple behaviours each time we are searching to show appropriate result sets. But, sometimes I am looking for something out of the ordinary. How is Google supposed to know that? Sometimes I’m looking for something on behalf of someone else, or I just feel like branching out. Sometimes, heaven forbid, I’m interested to see what’s new out there.
I’ll be clearing my cookies and deleting my history so Google can’t try and understand me. If you want Google to be your friend and predict your inner thoughts and desires go spend some time on your igoogle page, but I say Bah Humbug to giving my soul to Google.