Wednesday, October 19, 2011

In Search of...

From this video I learned that your filter bubble is designed for you and only you. No one else will see those same results even if they were to type the exact same thing in the search engine. Also, you don't ever get to see what the algorithms don't think you want to see. They filter things based on your past searches and if they don't think that something is relevant, they wont show it to you. End of story...
This new information makes me feel really small... Almost insignificant. I'm just another number or code in their eyes. It also makes me feel somewhat lied to. They aren't showing me everything that's outnthere and making me believe that what I see is everything that there is.
It makes me wonder what else is really out there. Im starting to realize that the Internet really is as big and dangerous as everyone says it is. And that's a really scary thought.
I guess to improve my searches I have to be very specific about what I want. I can't just use general terms. Also is I tried different phrasings of the same idea it might generate more results that I wouldn't have gotten the first time at it.


This time when I did the Shakespeare search I didn't just type in "William Shakespeare" and call it good with what I got the first time. I searched on 3 different computers and I typed in things like "Mr. Shakespeare" "Greatest English poet" really just anything I though might provide a different result. And to be honest, I didn't really get anything new. I got a little bit moremon his early life and am more organized list of the prices that he wrote but that's it.n this might be because I regularly use all of these computers and they already have my filter bible in place. I was hoping that this wouldnt occur seeing as that my parents also use the computers but it didn't go as well as I had hoped... To really get away from my filter bubble I think I'll have to go to a public library or a friends house and do a few searches over there.

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