Twittering Mad

Google and Facebook Hide things from you

They just do. It’s what makes your searches relevant to you. However, are the algorithms making those decisions actually making the decisions that we want them to make?

There’s two sides to this argument. 

1. You get everything the internet can offer. You spend time rummaging (see that’s the word we should use!) through everything available in order to find the best possible links that are relevant to what you want to do with those links.
2. Google/Facebook use algorithms based on your activity on those sites to create a picture of you. That means when you search for a particular subject or you look at your newsfeed the majority of the filtering you would have to do is already done. In that way there is a personalised page sitting in front of you. A page targeted specifically at you.

I personally lie with option one, although I like option two because I like the ability to target people through the social web. It’s part of my job. That said, it’s hard to decide on an ideal scenario. At the minute though, option two doesn’t seem to be fully formed for everyone’s personal targets based on what you click on most or first. The user needs options.

This is already fully in place already as Google as announced with social search and Facebook with their Edgerank algorithm, but it needs improvements.

For the moment we just have to work around it.