Personalization and Context have been among the most conspicuous buzzwords in information retrieval since quite a long while. As a result, advertising networks (including Google, Bing and a dozen others) track you with cookies, and infer from the pages you look at that you like, say, computers, linux, musical instruments, Java programming, and restaurants.
I do prefer being chased by normal-sized toaster ads to being chased by extra-large animated rollout flash non-targeted ads for, say travel or washing machines or typical spam material (get-rich-quick schemes, YOU HAVE WON, or, in earlier times when it was still something new and exciting, online banking). You can still have the worst of both worlds — lots of annoying ads despite all those powerful ways for targeting facebook ads.
But what about search engines? DuckDuckGo, a new, privacy-friendly search engine which has also other nice features (HTTPS by default, lots of specialized searches) has a presentation titled “Escape your search engine filter bubble!”. As a result of personalized search, one person searches for Egypt and finds information on political protests; another one searches for the same term and gets travel information.
My own solution to the problem has been to live inside my filter bubble, but occasionally take a peek at metafilter, which is relatively broad thematically (or: contains a lot of non-techie stuff) but manages to bring up relevant and often societally important topics and cool stuff.
I’ll probably switch back to that currently-most-popular search engine from the currently-most-successful engineering-driven web advertising company. I’ve decided not to give up my filter bubble, while occasionally sending out the odd pseudopod to get hold of new perspectives on known topics, or to learn more about topics in which I’m currently not versed. Please, dear search engine companies, can I have a surprise me! button that will lead me to the next interesting survey article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philpapers, or even something that is good quality and relevant that I did not even know about?