Sucking Exhaust In The Bubble

Over on WUWT there have been several stories about how, a year or so back, WUWT suddenly started having lower ‘hits’ in Google in searches.

Most of the discussion centered around things like the manual deweighting of some sites by Google staff, and changes to the algorithm that would filter for “relevance”. Here is just one example article:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/31/wuwt-seach-engine-issues/

I was wandering around trying to solve one problem (a security question had popped up. My router was behaving oddly and I was doing a phish back to see if someone was trying to take the link…) and looking up the IP number of some known sites (see if DNS was captured). When I ran into something else. The idea of a search engine “bubbling” you.
(A reboot of the router and all is fine, btw.)

It seems that part of the algorithm change was simply to “give you more of what you already do”. While I’m sure that’s useful for someone fixated on, say, Madonna, and uninterested in anything new; it is truly horrid for someone like me who is searching for the new, the different and novel, and something to learn about the world. A person where the “topic of the day” can bounce from slime mold to molding liquid stone to pink slime…

So lots of search engines now “Bubble You”. Search today for “Chinese Tea” and you will find very little about Indian Tea, Tea in England, or coffee houses in the USA that serve tea in future searches. YOU just put up some walls on your bubble of potential interests.

There’s a nice TED Talk on it here:

OK, this answered some things for me. For one, I’ve had to resort to ever longer lists of ‘search words’ to get new stuff. I now have to specifically start listing things like “Indian Tea”, “Tea in San Francisco”, etc. to break out of the bubble.

But some of the keys used are things like your location and kind of computer used. Now that’s got to be interesting in a household like mine where I have 4 computers I often use and the family has 3 more, mixed between Macs, PCs, and several flavors of Linux. Also browser type may be used as a search filter item. I use THREE browsers commonly on just ONE of my machines. (Which now partly explains why sometimes shifting between them has given me more interesting things…) As my router does NAT, we all will end up being tracked as the same IP address and same location. (Which probably explains some of the advertizing I’ve gotten for things that appeal to college kids ;-)

So part of the “issue” for WUWT will have been that more of the True Believers in AGW will have been stuffed into a bubble that excludes WUWT. Worse, Google looks at “like” clicks. So if one kind of person clicks “like” a lot on Hansen, WUWT will not be offered to other folks of a similar bubble type. It becomes MUCH harder to be of one socioeconomic cast and discover things outside that realm.
Once an 18 year old high school student, always in high school…

Now think about this for a minute. It is, in essence, ENFORCED “consensus”. Once you have been pegged, you will only be offered things in keeping with that peg. Your biases become computer enforced “sucking your own exhaust”.
Incredibly dumb.

On a larger level, to the extent broad “popularity” rankings are applied, ALL minority tastes, opinions, and interests will dwindle in the face of the Style Bubble Of Conformity.

One counter trend, though. After the change, Google became much less ‘interesting’ to me. I’m a person who is prone to novelty seeking. It became more “20 flavors of vanilla”. As a result, I ran off to try other search engines. I’ve now found that swapping between them is a benefit all by itself, but also have a favorite. One that doesn’t “Bubble Me”.

I didn’t know that term for it until today. I just knew it was more interesting.

Now, one other minor note on WUWT: This also explains why so many different folks had different experiences ‘testing’ Google for bias. If, for example, I had been doing research on Warmer Sites, I’d be pigeon holed as a “Warmer” and get less WUWT. OTOH, were I prone to using Google to find WUWT articles with things like “WUWT Hansen”, I’d be pegged more “skeptic”. In both cases folks begin to get skewed results.

So, what can you do about it?

First off, I don’t use any of the “Social Networking” anythings. Since the data they gather can enter into the Pigeonhole Process, that is denied to them. ( I have never used them anyway simply because of the incredible security risk they pose.)

Now I also know to swap browsers more “regularly”. In particular, I’ll likely reserve one for “skeptical” searches and another for “Warmer” searches. Similarly I’ll likely set one whole computer aside as “Warmer Only” and search things likely to be in that same socioeconomic “bubble” all on that machine. Basically, I’ll be building up some Plastic Personas that are biased toward different search results. Doing some searches from Whole Foods and others from the Hilton Free Wi-Fi will also be fruitful… Especially if done from a pristine boot off a BBC Bootable Business Card that has zero history on it.

But what if you are not interested in the more extreme fixes?

Back To The Beginning

What started this was a search on the IP address of my preferred search engine: DuckDuckgo.com where an ‘nslookup’ had returned information saying it was in Japan (who knew?)…

Checking their ‘about’ pages for confirming information, I hit their page about not “Bubbling Me”… and the rest, as they say, is history. Simply by using that web search engine, I can be Un-Bubbled. That it doesn’t track my IP or tattle on me is a nice feature too.

Their very readable graphic based presentation on Bubbling is well worth a look.

So there you have it. In order to check for bias in the results from Google or Yahoo, one needs to change all sorts of personal data and try from many geographies. Or just swap to DuckDuckGo and not worry about it ;-)

A corollary to this will be that the technically naive (like those who largely just do a kind of follow-the-leader in AGW and Green organizations) will end up with an ever stronger Bubble and ever more self confirmation bias (as that is all that shows up in web searches). So is it any wonder they all think alike and don’t see anything outside the consensus?

One can only hope that the process can also lead to a kind of Cascade Failure. That getting one or two articles which are tagged and “hit” as “Warmer Centric” but that present the skeptic wisdom, will start to cause some “viral clicking” that then cascades into more ‘top of list’ rank on “Warmer” searches for the whole package of related skeptical wisdom. Then, as the light dawns, more follow on clicks could shift the mountain… One can hope…

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