Facebook - New Search Function

         Face book the popular Social Networking site has launched a new search Function. It helps search friends based on the personal information in each profile. It has become a wide spread network similar to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. This search function is quite different because one can find people from their own school, college or similar likeness and interests. But this is not a direct competitor to Google as it is not a search engine rather it just helps the user find certain events that are not found in these search engines says Mark Zuckerberg. He adds to that saying that he does not intend to bring more people in to do web search rather help them find certain particulars of the event they are searching. He says that the new search function will help updating the graph every now and then. This shows the biggest different from the other web searches.

       I personally do not feel happy about this search engine because it allows people those relate to my personal information. It does not give me a broad view point. I also do not like my information to be available to everyother person no matter even if they are from my own school or college. I also do not wish to share my pictures with some person randomly just because we like similar activities and things. The reason I feel uncomfortable about this is because I have been used to looking at this as a personal site which now turns out to be more commercial or public which makes me feel uncomfortable and on other hand narrows down my search function to only things based on my personal information which is not dependable as I might have not mentioned all of my personal interests on my profile.

Search Engines in Facebook

Referred Sites:

     http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21032506

     http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/feb/25/how-search-engines-are-changing-journalism/transcript/

     https://www.thetakeaway.org/2013/jan/16/facebook-unveils-new-search-function/

     

Filter Bubble

This is based on the ted talk on filter bubble:

·         The example of a squirrel dying in your front yard that takes more important than the other people dying in Africa. It expresses each one’s interest in various things and aspects.

·         The Shift and invisible flow of internet just makes us locked or isolated in one circle.

·         He gives Face book as an example, which edited the conservative friends with whom he was not in regular conversation with, without even notifying him.

·         Even Google shows different search results for the same topic depending on the personalized information.

·         This personalized information is decided by the internet. This internet decides what we want to see and not necessarily what we need to see.

·         “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume things that had not in some sense been tailored for them” says Eli Pariser.

·         The internet has unique personal information of each of us online, which is not given by us but taken by the internet based on our previous searches. So we are not aware of what is filtered out.

·         The human editors worked based on various aspects in broadcasting information to us. Now-a-days no human editors work on this, instead algorithmic editors, which does not even have ethics, edit information for us.

·         So these algorithmic editors need to include Important, uncomfortable, challenging and other points of view in addition to relevance.

·         Earlier, newspapers were edited with journalistic ethic which was not considered perfect, even though we survived with them for centuries. A good flow of information was required for a well-functioning democracy.

·         Thus the filter bubble need to be either recoded or changed so that we do not stay isolated in the web, but connect to everything and everybody as it was created for.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/eli_pariser.html 

My Experience with Filter Bubble

              Filter bubble does make life easier at some point when we actually need just something that is related to what we searched earlier. I have personally experienced this, when I watch a video in YouTube, though I shut down my laptop that has windows 7 OS and get back to the YouTube page much later or even after a day or two, it just gives the link of my previous video that I watched. But the more surprising part is that when I used a different computer which has MAC, to log into my Gmail account and then when I opened a new tab with YouTube site, it still showed me the same links that I watched previously in my laptop at home. It just shows how the filter narrows down my view. If the YouTube page had not linked me to the previously watched videos I would have watched the general topics like politics and sports that would appear normally on the page. It is quite distracting most of the times. It also varies each time I open the page. I did have a bad experience with this earlier. When I open a page to get information for a class assignment in Google and when I forget to note the URL, I can never get that back even though I search with the same title I did earlier.

My Experiment with Filter Bubble

            I did an experiment on this filter bubble and the way it works. When I use it in my day-to-day life I have realized how differently the internet works even when I search for the same thing twice, but when I did an experiment it actually showed up similar results in most of the computer. I believe that the most of the company like Google, YouTube, etc. started coding their algorithmic editors differently. I did few screen shots of these and found how YouTube give its own links to its viewers based on the previous searches and personal information that the internet received. The YouTube did make a difference while viewed in different computers.

The results on different computers.

The OPT related to my area of study came as a result by itself.