> What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at all.
> Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'
And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question. Google takes in a lot of signals (links, country and language, past behavior with respect to previous queries, sites you've asked to be blocked, ...) and now social signals. Where do you draw the line and why? And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?
>And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question.
I'd agree with that. In fact, I'd say that's a lot to do with my point... I believe that search results should be literal. A search for 'python', in my opinion, ought to return links to information about the animal, the language, the character from The Jungle Book, etc.
>And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?
This is interesting. I guess what I'd like to see is something along these lines. Turning it over in my head earlier: the thought of making two distinct types of searches did cross my mind, ie: searching from your G+ homepage returns focused results from the web at large with social results intermingling whereas searching from www.google.com returns literal results with no fiddling. The user is enabled to select which one is used by default from the search bar in their browser.
I'd draw the line somewhere in the past, before all that stuff you mention.
Links in Hebrew (I'm in Israel) are unreadable and not helping.
I constantly end up with German results polluting my search (maybe because I signed up when I lived in Germany? No idea, it's out of my control). It is a hassle to fight them.
It got never better. I gradually noticed a trend of decreasing usefulness of Google search, without any visible sign of getting better. Only more dumbed down. And now 'social'?
> Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'
And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question. Google takes in a lot of signals (links, country and language, past behavior with respect to previous queries, sites you've asked to be blocked, ...) and now social signals. Where do you draw the line and why? And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?