On Google, I searched the phrase “fly fishing”. The first three websites that popped up were a Wikipedia article on fly fishing, flyfisherman.com, and flyshop.com. Surprisingly, upon inspection of each of the sites they all offered different information about fly fishing. The first site, Wikipedia, gave a basic overview of the history of fly fishing along with general information on casting and tying you own flies. The second website, flyfisherman.com, was a magazine. This magazine was, you guessed it, about fly fishing. Some of the articles included destinations for fly fishing along with advice on gear selection and technique. The final link, flyshop.com, was shopping website. They had an online catalog with equipment you could buy along with a section were you could sign up for fly fishing trips and seminars.
On Google, my neighbor in the dorm next to me, Nat, searched the same phrase “fly fishing”. From his search on Google he got two of the same three search results. Instead of getting flyfisherman.com, he got an article on about.com about how to fly fish. Other than that he had the same results in the top three on Google.
I am surprised by the results, because “fly fishing” is a very broad topic yet also can be very specific to certain groups of people at the same time. And to be honest, I wasn’t quite convinced that Google personalized search based upon previous searches. I have watched videos about fly fishing on YouTube before and shopped for equipment online. Whereas my next door neighbor has probably never encountered anything close to fly fishing or even fishing on the Internet. To me it is a good thing that Google personalizes searches. This is because my neighbor when searching fly fishing would have received results that were too advanced for him per say. Whereas I being a fly fishermen already know the basics and therefore articles on how to fly fish are not pertinent to me. Although this is good for some instances, many opponents to personalized Internet searching would say that Google is shielding them from information such ideas of people that are not the same as them. But I think that people unknowingly agree with personalized Internet search because for instance when you are searching for a store location, the tackle shop in California doesn’t help me if I’m in Blacksburg, VA. But then there are topics such as politics that are very opinionated where the computer doesn’t know what you want. Your view point, or insight on the opposite viewpoint based on your previous searches. Therefore I believe that personalized search is a good thing that is being implemented into the Internet, and the responsibility is on the user of the internet to make sure they see what they want to.
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