Sufficient consensus
Filter bubbles describe the narrowing of exposure caused by personalized selection. Empirical work shows the effect is smaller than early accounts claimed and real in specific conditions.
Personalization is the default across search, social and commerce.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Self-selection does most of the work. People narrow their own exposure through the words they choose, before any algorithm intervenes.
- The option that is never named. Someone who has only heard of one solution searches for it, finds ten versions, and confirms their starting point.
- Confirmation feels like completion. A search that agrees with you ends early and satisfied, which is the most efficient way to learn nothing.
- The publisher's opportunity. Naming the alternative the reader did not consider is the one move that breaks the loop, and it is rarely commercially attractive.
- Hasty decisions. Personalization shortens the path from question to conclusion, and the time saved is taken out of the thinking.
What people actually want to know
- What am I not being shown?
- Which solution exists that I have never heard of?
- Did I search to learn something, or to confirm something?
- What would somebody who disagrees with me search for?
From the perspective of optimizing results, a search for diving holidays should be completed with mountaineering and meditation in the desert. The search intent was diving. The user intent was recreation.
More in social epistemology
Search engine epistemologyTen results that agree are ten results that were selected by the same criteria.Algorithmic biasNeutral procedure applied to unequal material produces unequal output.Information qualityFluent and confident are easier to produce than accurate.Epistemic trustTrust is the mechanism.Echo chambersAdding facts to it changes nothing, because the facts arrive through a discredited channel.Distributed epistemologyThe part that is written down is the part that had a reason to be written down.Epistemic injusticeA search result inherits that and turns it into an ordering.