Tags: , , | Posted on January 24, 2012

The filter bubble in social search.

Ray Cromwell posted an interesting comment on PandoDaily. Well worth thinking about:

People talk about the “filter bubble”, it’s 10x worse on social networks. What if your question is political, like, how fiscal policy affects the economy? If your friends are all libertarians, you get one set of answers, and if your friends are all progressives, you get another set. In particular, I doubt you’ll get directed to a neutral point of view article on Wikipedia.

I just don’t see how you replace a search that leverages the sum total of indexable human information, that has been curated for a long time by citation, with crowdsourcing. At best, your friends will take your question and run a Google search for you, so you’ve really just crowdsourced the art of crafting a query.

Source blog post: Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren’t Google’s Real Problems, Relevancy Is.