Bing to offer Facebook-slurping 'friend search' Microsoft poked its search engine users again yesterday, to remind them that it now offers personalised results based on the opinions of friends on Facebook. Bing was given the Facebook treatment in October last year, prompting protests from Google's Matt Cutts, who argued that the company was being slipshod with users' …
"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." Scott Adams may have done a later paraphrase though.
In related news, Wired are reporting that the wisdom of crowds decreases when they know what each other has said:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline/
There's a great TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
That discusses this obsession by online companies delivering you information where it may be stuff that you want but not what you actually need. Jamming social network crap into your search results will limit the information that you need even more as it will have been personalised to such a degree that the information is near on pointlessly skewed to your world-view.
Now that said, I do not trust a convicted monopolist and a company who's main business aim is selling off my personal information. Also, somehow bing manages to fail me not only on delivering information that I want but also information that I need. You've really got to give credit to MS for making a search engine that can fail consistently at searching.
Please do not assume any of the above means I trust Google either, it's merely the lesser evil of on-line companies.
As your outlook mostly determines what type of friends you have around, conservatives will only see Faux News reports and softy lefties only the Huffington Post; and both will believe they have mainstream opinions.
"goldmine of data that is facebook" my foot. There's probably only 50 original posts on all of FB, the rest are like/dislikes.
I guess if you gather all data including photo analysis you will learn that white people have a relatively high number of white friends & children, and that in the UK many "poppy"s have a sister called "olivia" or a brother called "jack".
"if a big search engine allowed me to bury results from websites that I _never_ want to see again"
Google does:
searchterm searchterm searchterm -expertsexchange.com
(takes me back to the old Alta Vista days: I had a standard suffix I'd add to my search terms that was about a mile long, full of "and not hotlist and not hotpage and not jumppage and not "my links"" and so on - it really helped filter out the cha[ff|ves]).
Now if only Google would support NEAR (as in '"kernel patch" near "broken serial"').
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