Personalized search: Holy Grail or a crock?

Search engine gurus slobber over its prospects,
but can the loss of online privacy be justified?
Three major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, and Amazon's a9.com -- are either experimenting with, or at least talking about, something called "personalized search." Microsoft is headed in this direction also, and is considered to have the advantage because of its access to the files on your desktop. The concept is simple -- the more a search engine knows about your history, your consumer patterns, your past searches, and your interests as an individual, the better position it is in to provide search results. It can base these results not merely on the terms you entered in the search box, but also deduce what you really meant by those terms.

Amazon's obvious profiling agenda behind a9.com is designed to lay the foundation for personalized search. Everything you search for is tracked, and also combined with your search and purchasing history at Amazon.com itself. When you log into Amazon, they immediately suggest some books to purchase. This is only a tiny taste of where Amazon wants to go with their profiling software.

Pundits and commentators are uncritical of the assumptions behind personalized search. They never frame the issue in its proper context, and invariably agree with the CEOs and engineers that they interview, that personalization is some sort of high-tech Holy Grail for search engines. The message we get is that personalized search is so obviously beneficial, that no one could possibly object to it.

It's easy to see why the search engines are in love with personalization. The more personal data they can collect, the more they can charge for targeted advertising. But they never express it in these terms. Why should they? No one ever asks them any hard questions about their assumptions.

Here are a couple of examples that the pundits are fond of using. If you search for "bass," are you interested in music or are you a fisherman? The search engine that knows you will know the answer. Or if you search for "apple," do you mean the fruit or the computer? Of course, you could simply add the word "music" or "fishing" behind "bass," or add "fruit" or "computer" behind "apple." This way you could achieve the same results that the personalized search engine delivers, and you don't have to let the engine cyber-fingerprint your every move on the Internet. Why does anyone need personalized search anyway? Are we so lazy that an extra word is too much trouble?

On a broader level, consider the dumbing-down effect of personalized search. Once the engine decides it knows what you want, your world view is narrowed further. The pursuit of information is supposed to broaden the mind, not narrow it. How many times have you found something interesting that you didn't expect to find on a page of links from a search engine? How often would this happen if the engine scrubbed the results first by running it past your profile? How do you turn it off if you don't want the personalized skew, perhaps because you're interested in something new? More to the point, why turn it on in the first place, when all it does is save you from typing one or two extra words?

Personalized search is a crock, beyond any doubt. It won't work well, and the extent to which it might work someday could easily be harmful rather than beneficial. These effects come at the cost of your online privacy, which would be too high a price to pay even if the results held high promise.

The only mystery is why so many commentators haven't figured this out. Actually, it's not all that mysterious. There are very few journalists who ask hardball questions of search engine experts, because their access to high-tech corporate players requires a certain level of uncritical acceptance. Even the dot-com crash did little to change this picture. Also, there are relatively few nonprofit, public-sector activists who follow the Internet closely or know much about it. Another problem is that bloggers often set the agenda for high-tech babble, and most bloggers became enemies of personal privacy from the first moment that they started their blog.

This must change, or the search engines will consider it their mission to turn all of us into dumbed-down consumers. And as the engines go, so goes the entire Internet.