Google starting to think for me?
March 27th, 2006 by Ivo
After I noticed the internationalisation quirks in google, I found several other things that seem to suggest that google starts to 'think' for the user.
If on google.com, I perform a regular search for 'pagani zonda', google first presents me three image results, followed by the regular results. If I search directly on google images, I first find images that are of far less quality than the three I got on my normal search result page. Seems almost as if they were hand-picked.
When I search for 'Jennifer Aniston' however, it first presents a set of news links, then the regular results. No pics this time.
Both Jennifer Aniston and Pagani Zonda have news items and images related to them. But somehow it decides that I would want to have pictures of a Pagani, but news about Jennifer.
(and I'm not using the personalization feature).
Another thing I noticed, when I search for the word 'gem', the first 10 results are 'compromised'. 3 out of the 10 results are results for the word 'jem'; As if Google not only wants to suggests that the word is spelled wrong, but it is so sure about that, that it makes 33% of the first results page reflect this alternative spelling (even though 'gem' is a perfectly legal English word).
This is different behaviour than when I search for many other words, when it just uses the regular 'did you mean ...' suggestion.
Searching for 'jem' first presents a google music search result, before displaying 'regular' results.
Luckily, searching for 'php' still seems to be untouched. 
I find this scary. Where google used to be a page rank based objective search engine, presenting just what it found in its indexes, it's now starting to become an engine that influences what I find, based on assumptions it makes, probably from all the search stats they are collecting.
Horror story: once the entire world uses google, they control our very access to information, and by manipulating the results based on our own 'preferences', they essentially control what information we do or do not consume. I guess this is material for a new Dan Brown novel.