Looking for friends in all the wrong search engines
I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.
At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.
Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.
There was a lot of useless cruft, as there generally is. But at the bottom of the page I noticed my boss’s name. That seemed odd to me. His blog (http://ribbonfarm.com) is well read but I didn’t think it was that popular or that relevant to my search that it would be on the front page of the search results! So I looked at the referenced post. It was 2 years old, I had read it when it was new, and it was completely irrelevant.
Then I noticed the header that said something about my social circle. Hmmm. Yes, my boss and I have chatted using Google chat. We don’t very often, partly because our work is covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so over an uncontrolled forum like Google chat (or anybody else’s chat) there’s a limit to what we can say without violating confidentiality. So we do most of our discussions over work-based email. We don’t do them in person because we work in different states and rarely see each other but that’s neither here nor there.
We come here to the question of the definition of “social circle.” My boss is a good guy and I consider him a friend, so I don’t have a problem with him being included in my social circle (This is an important thing. We’re both highly opinionated and a bit hard headed. If we weren’t on pretty friendly terms, we’d probably kill each other). I have had bosses in the past who would make me feel exactly the opposite. I work in the IT field, where 24/7 availability is more or less the norm. That means sometimes you use non-work channels to get in touch with people. This means that Google’s definition of a social circle may contain any number of inappropriate people. What about the times I’ve emailed tech support at some company, or complained about a product? They are decidedly NOT part of my “social circle!”
On Google’s page describing the social search (http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228) which I found after some hunting, there is a description of how to remove irrelevant stuff like that from the circle of friends so it won’t be considered in social search results. It seems to be possible to just tell Google not to use someone when doing this search, though I haven’t tried it. What this means to me is that this feature I didn’t ask for puts the onus on ME to fine tune it to avoid seeing results I don’t want. Picture me banging my head against a wall at this point. I won’t actually do it because I hate pain but come on!
Actually, after looking over the options for how to remove such things from my social circle (and the little disclaimer that says it can take weeks for them to actually disappear from your search results. Way to be responsive Google! Thanks!) I’m thinking the only real option is to not use Google. For anything. Because they cull everything you use for social connections.
This brings us to my next emotion about social search: CREEPY.
The use case they describe in their documentation is getting a movie review. They say that movie reviews from your friends will be more relevant to you than movie reviews from some unknown professional reviewer somewhere. Well, there’s a good point there. I have no respect at all for professional reviewers. The other night a friend and I were watching a movie review TV show and I remarked that when the critics use terms like, “real emotion,” “honest” and “true to life” you couldn’t pay me enough to watch whatever it is they’re reviewing. Those may be fine artistic qualities but do not, in my experience, make the product very entertaining. Unless you’re the kind of person who thinks that emptying a box of Kleenex because you’re crying so hard is a lot of fun. That’s not me.
On the other hand, I have NEVER IN MY LIFE USED GOOGLE TO FIND A MOVIE REVIEW. Are there a lot of people doing that kind of thing? Why? The world is full of movie review sites. I would expect that anyone who is interested in movie reviews is already familiar with rottentomatoes.com or similar sites. There’s no need to search for that. I’d be interested to see what numbers Google has for those types of searches. In other words, does this use case have any relationship to reality or is it just an excuse to jump on the social networking bandwagon?
Facebook, the current leader of social networking technology, has gotten into repeated trouble for taking people’s information about themselves and their friends and using it for more than just to let people share a laugh with their friends. When Google rolled out the execrable Google Buzz, they got in to similar product because users of Gmail (myself included) thought they were getting an email service and did not expect or intend to be advertising their whole lives to the world (see my post about Buzz here).
So now they’re doing it again. You search for stuff and they show you irrelevant results from people you have had some contact with in the past, no matter how slight or even hostile that contact may have been. Does Google understand that what they’re doing this way is actually CHANGING your social circle?
Just as an experiment, I signed up for a service called Gist a while back. It aggregates stuff from the contacts you supply to it and tries to rank them for importance. One of the things I noticed was that the service gauged importance by how often some of these people posted to their blog or to Twitter, not by how often they had contact with me. So people I have only very slight contact with were shown very high in the listings merely by virtue of being busy. People I’ve had contact with but hardly ever think of were ranked as important, while those I truly care about were virtually ignored.
There may be tools to fix these rankings. I don’t know or care. I’m just trying to illustrate a point that Google social search does something similar. People I may have never had much contact with in the past, because they were never more than casual contacts, could still have their stuff show up in my search results, simply because they are active in blogging or Twitter or some other such thing. And, like anything else in search, putting them on the front page gets them more clicks, thereby increasing their importance (at least as far as Google is concerned). There is also likely to be a psychological effect that the people whose stuff you click on increase in importance in your mind (There’s an opportunity for someone to do an interesting thesis here).
Google has turned and information search into a social feedback mechanism. I’m not comfortable with this at all.
True, to some extent, all social networking does this. On Facebook I have connections to people I haven’t seen in years, or have only met a couple times. On LinkedIn I have quite a few connections to people I have never met and only know by reputation. But that’s what LinkedIn is for, so it’s okay. On Facebook, my connections are intended to carry some emotional import and I appreciate the news updates, even from people I don’t know incredibly well. It’s a chance to get to know them better and I like that.
But search? When I run a search for no sql databases, or research on trusted systems, or encryption libraries or any of a billion other topics that might grab my attention for a few minutes (All of the ones I’ve mentioned are related to courses I’ve taken, or to my job, or both), having my relationships vetted and subtly influenced at the same time is NOT what I want.
Here’s another little bit that has problematic implications: “If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know.” So now Google is recommending friends. It’s annoying enough when Facebook does that. No, I don’t want to connect with the lead singer of a band that my family is all connected to (unless it’s Flogging Molly). You see, most of my family is half my age and has one millionth of my knowledge of and taste in music. Leave me alone!
Which brings us to the annoying part. There are probably many people who think that having this sort of thing integrated into search results is interesting and fun. There are probably even situations where I would find it worthwhile. I can’t think of one but it’s possible. But Google didn’t ask me if that was what I wanted. I don’t see a place where I can choose “add social search to my results.” And it didn’t show up at all in a test search I ran just a minute ago. I have no idea why not. The ways of Google are not our ways. Their thoughts are not our thoughts.
If they’re thinking at all beyond the dreaded programmer’s cry, “Hey! I just thought of a cool new feature!”
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