On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers

On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers(online.wsj.com)

50 points by cainetighe 13 years ago | 24 comments

carbocation 13 years ago |

This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline.

The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]

By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2]

[1] = http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&...

[2] = http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-compl...

epi0Bauqu 13 years ago | |

I'm planning on blogging a bit on this particular topic tomorrow. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll try to address them.

I don't think the gTrends argument works though (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741590). Most of the results inserted are super-recent (and so I expect the recency of the trends data -- like the last 90 days -- to dominate). Of course it is all a black box so who knows.

Some of the more interesting things to me are:

--you can't reliably de-personalize (as you cited).

--the variation in results across our study was great.

--variation for signed out (even incognito) users was not much different from signed in users.

carbocation 13 years ago | | |

It would be vaguely interesting to know from study participants how unique their browser is.[1] Mine appeared to yield the same result whether in incognito mode or not, but I can't really see Google using this approach.

Your point about Google trends is counterintuitive but evidence-supported, which makes it particularly interesting. It may well be that they are looking at outcome measures after search personalization, and abandoning personalizations that yield no results. Or perhaps a certain volume is required over time for a particular query before triggering an automated personalization trial. As you say, it's a black box, so who knows.

[1] = https://panopticlick.eff.org/

alanctgardner2 13 years ago |

I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney

Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.

Come on WSJ, you can do better.

edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches are:

1) Burundi 2) Guinea 3) Rwanda 4) Sierra Leone 5) United States

Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.

epi0Bauqu 13 years ago | |

That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...

If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...

Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security, health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...

alanctgardner2 13 years ago | | |

I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.

timtadh 13 years ago | |

In a similar vein. Here is the trend with the addition of the candidates in the previous 2 elections:

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%2...

It will be interesting to see if Obama wins. If he does then winning in Google Trends will predict winning in the election.

dbecker 13 years ago | |

Regarding popularity by country: I don't know, but I would speculate that decreased access in Burundi, Guinea, etc. means they don't use the internet for mundane stuff... shopping or looking at cats.

Thus Obama may constitute a larger proportion of searches in those places than in the US.

haberdasher 13 years ago |

Alternate Headline: DuckDuckGo chief, trying to rustle up more users from Google personalization-fear-baiting, spoon feeds article to WSJ.

What'd I miss?

drivebyacct2 13 years ago | |

Is there evidence of this?

mherdeg 13 years ago | | |

Sure, read the last few paragraphs of this Journal article. The reporter is up front about her source: "Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""

""In September, Gabriel Weinberg, founder and chief executive of tiny Duck Duck Go Inc., which markets itself as a privacy-protecting search engine, stumbled across the "you recently searched for" phenomenon in a study he conducted of Google's personalization efforts. Mr. Weinberg, whose site is based in Paoli, Pa., asked 131 of its users to search Google for several keywords at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 2: "Obama," "abortion" and "gun control." His testers received a wide variety of different results that appeared to be personalized by location and other factors.

Mr. Weinberg also noticed that some testers received results labeled "you recently searched for Obama," and discovered that he couldn't replicate the same label when searching for Romney. Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""

There's no shame in running an interesting story that's brought to your attention by someone with vested interests.

For example, notorious fraudster Barry Minkow dug up a list of all the executives in publicly traded corporations who lied about their college degrees and gave that information to the WSJ after short-selling the companies, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652836844922165.html.

Win-win -- the Journal got an important news tip, and he made some money on the bounce.

Unfortunately for Minkow, he couldn't resist going after just bad companies and ended up in prison for defrauding a home-building company, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190346110457646....

sanxiyn 13 years ago | | |

Strong circumstantial evidence. See also http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

amalag 13 years ago |

WSJ is really turning into Murdoch's mouthpiece. The breaking news is that at standing president of 4 years has different search results than his opponent?

achille 13 years ago |

Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience

1. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com

2. Set the default search engine to: https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s

Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.

bajsejohannes 13 years ago | |

Thank you.

> a person who searches for "Harry Potter," and then for "Amazon," actually wants "Harry Potter" results from Amazon.com Inc.

For my case, this would never be true. I would simply append "amazon" to the original search. Now, I could probably train myself to not do that, but I don't want to. I don't want my search engine to have any kind of state, but unfortunately Google thinks I want the opposite.

I guess I want Google to be purely functional. The same query will give the same answer, no matter who asks it and no matter where in the world it's asked. I certainly don't want Google to create a little filter bubble just for me.

epi0Bauqu 13 years ago | |

Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately -- though is a good start at protecting yourself.

achille 13 years ago | | |

Sorry, meant to say depersonalize. Care to expand why this doesn't work? Just ran the same test, and I see the exact same results.

BrianPetro 13 years ago |

This TED talk does a good job explaining the concepts of what is happening in this article.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

DanielBMarkham 13 years ago |

"...In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers..."

I hate to continue the political thread, but "biased" doesn't quite cut it. Algorithms don't automatically make everything magic. There is a structural issue that just saying "it's the algorithm" doesn't explain or address.

No doubt the data leans that way because Obama has been a searchable term for longer. This just leads to the natural question: should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content? I don't think so, but I find myself arguing with a mathematical formula. The nature of the social value of making democratic decisions is different from the nature of the personal value of targeting results.

Weird.

shasta 13 years ago | |

"should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content?"

Since the incumbent has already campaigned the previous election, fairness dictates that he shouldn't be allowed to campaign at all against the challenger.

maratd 13 years ago |

> In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers.

This is pure nonsense. Algorithms are written by humans and are just as biased as their creators.