The Demographics of Web Search 131
adaviel sends a link to work out of Yahoo Research indicating that demographics can help Web searches; e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US "wagner" is a paint sprayer. The Yahoo researchers claim that by taking user demographics into account, "they managed to get the chosen link to appear as the top-ranked result 7 per cent more often than in the standard Yahoo search." New Scientist mentions this research and two other innovative adjuncts to current search practice: following the mouse cursor as a proxy for eye tracking, and taking back bearings on online criminals by studying the searches they make. (The latter raises disburbing privacy questions: would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?)
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Because you're in the target demographic.
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Because you had the opportunity to have the first post, which you managed to get.
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If you had read the story, you'd know that they can change the color to reflect what gender you are, making you more likely to read the article.
Then again, this is slashdot - 10x more likely is still 0.000-something %.
Wrong century (Score:3, Informative)
Wilhelm Richard Wagner [wikipedia.org] was born in 1813 and died in 1883 which makes him a 19th Century German composer, not an 18th c. German composer.
Remember, here in 2010 it's the 21st century; in 1910 it was the 20th c.; in 1810 it was the 19th c., etc.
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who is asking you? (Score:3, Insightful)
would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?
- what do you mean 'would you want', who is asking you, plebes?
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Thank goodness /. editors ask these probing questions in the summary. I wouldn't know what to discuss otherwise.
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Correction: (Score:4, Informative)
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Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
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Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Good heavens, why was this modded Insightful? I think the poster was going for Funny. Anyhow, a quick Wikipedia search reveals that Richard Wagner lived from 1813-1883, making him a 19th century composer.
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Modded insightful twice too... I guess some people can't be bothered to think for themselves and just moderate to increase whatever the current moderation is.
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What's really amusing is that two people posting mutually exclusive answers are currently at +3 and +4.
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And BitterOak can't be bothered to actually read Yvan256's answer for what it is: an ironic twist citing the summary as a reference for itself.
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Modded insightful twice too... I guess some people can't be bothered to think for themselves and just moderate to increase whatever the current moderation is.
I've seen that trend from time to time -- it becomes most obvious when two people make essentially the same comment; one gets modded up, the other modded down.
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..but he just plagiarized stuff from the 18th century...
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Good heavens, why was this modded Insightful?
Funny doesn't give karma.
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Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Quick, somebody update Wikipedia! You can cite this Slashdot article as your source.
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Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
No it doesn't, it says he's a 20th century paint-sprayer company.
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Richard Wagner is much more famous though.
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Wagner was a 19th-century composer, not 18th.
But when I (male) search for Wagner I'm more interested in Jill [imdb.com] than Josef or Richard.
Wanger *was* an 18th-century composer (Score:3, Interesting)
That would probably be Georg Gottfried Wagner (1698-1756), who also played violin for Bach (1685-1750), another 18th-century composer, and not to be confused with Leonhard Emil Bach (1849-1902), a 19th-century composer.
Either that or KDawson thinks that "18 century" means "1800s."
(I am a musicologist, but I am not your musicologist, and this post is not intended as musicological advice).
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It's also the name of a really, really shitty brand of airless paint sprayers, which do a great job of splattering paint all over and making a huge mess.
Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Funny)
> would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?
Heck yes I want Google trolling through governments' search data.
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The "but since I don't [insert something here] much so I'm not too worried." argument is dangerous:
"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
-Martin Niemöller
more information [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps the example above is a bit extreme, but today liberties are not lost in large chunks, just inch-by-inch.
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> would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?
Wait, you mean they don't already? Hum, odd, I could have sworn they already did.
No, they don't. You're thinking of WikiLeaks.
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what else would you expect from a site full of paranoid libertarian linux-using pedophile virgins?
Re:Then again... (Score:5, Insightful)
What would be useful is if I could choose to search from a different persons/demographic's point of view. Whether for ebay, amazon, google.
For example say I am looking for a gift for someone else. Or I am helping someone else search for stuff. Or I'm the sort of person who has rather different interests but with search keywords that overlap.
Same goes for reviews of restaurants/movies/etc. What I like, someone else may detest.
Lastly, it could also be interesting (and even beneficial) to be able to more easily see things from other people's point of view.
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I'd prefer the search engine to not assume based on any information about me. A search engine should report the exact same results regardless of who performs the search. I should be able to tell someone "do a Google search for 'Wagner paint sucks'" and they should get the exact same results as I get, assuming they do the search at about the same time (as the results will change over time as links expire or websites change).
If I want to search for information about shitty Wagner paint sprayers, I'll search
Neat-o. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Yes, I'm being facetious, but still. That Wagner example is pretty awful.)
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Stereotyping search queries causes problems: One, a lot of people lie about their age and other stats. Two, just because it's true for the group doesn't mean it's true for the individual. For example, gays and lesbians have far different profiles than their heterosexual demographically-matched counterparts. Profession can mean a lot to a search too, or even race. And I'm sure this isn't motivated at all by making more targeted advertisements, too! Last, what if you want to know what other people not from yo
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Remember this is for the top-ranked results; if you don't match the demographics, it just mean you'll possibly have to click a few more pages.
Besides, search engines (at least Google) give you a way to disable personalization [google.com]. I wouldn't bet that they actually delete and stop collecting data, but at least it probably doesn't apply it to re-order the results.
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Just because it's true for the group doesn't mean it's true for the individual.
Improving search results is about aggregates -- returning the best results for the most queries. Individuals don't matter. Google has used this fact to their advantage to show many links to many people while keeping their interface clean: each user only sees three links at the bottom of the main page, for example, but each of n>>3 links displayed in that spot is viewed many times.
If Yahoo can move relevant links higher in the result list for 15 percent of queries, the only concern is about the quan
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Sadly, I think you're right about how SEO is practiced, though I would think that REAL SEO (true Scottsman?) would mean ensuring that your site is showing up more for those folks for whom it IS relevant, and less for folks for whom it is not.
In other words if I have a niche site selling foo, then my site is very relevant to folks searching for foo. If there is some real correlation between folks who like foo and folks who also like bar, then my site may also be relevant to them. However, if baz is totally u
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The more people you get to see your listing, the mor eclick on it, and the more that end up giving you their money (through whatever method)
Thus, modern SEO works to give their customers the best value for their money, which, currently, is higher matches for their chosen keywords.
Do keep in mind, however, that these keywords typically have to be fairly relevant for the rest of it to work. The best SEO companies don't go about rating 'home improvment' type sites for, s
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Stereotype- All black people like to eat fried chicken.
Demographic- Out of any given group of black people, there is a probability of X% that any given person will like fried chicken. (Or, that X% of the group will like fried chicken)
So, is it stereotypical to say "Most black people like to eat fried chicken", if > 50% of the group does?
This is the whole problem with the "racism!" and "stereotyping!" cries. Certain groups of people DO have certain trends in their behavior. Obviously, not all of them ac
Yikes! (Score:2)
When Google started to change from just linking the "Did you mean?" results to actually inserting them in place of the results for what I actually searched for, I realized on some level that this might be appropriate for people who don't know what they're doing and aren't paying attention, and that those people might be in the majority... But I didn't bother mentioning that in my angry feedback. =)
Maybe Google doesn't care about customer feedback because they're not in a position where they have to worry ab
Sexist search engines (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's really what we need...
What next, a search result that depends on your religion? If you type "Origin of the Universe", you get articles about the Bible if the engine thinks you're Christian, and scientific material otherwise?
They need to understand there is little value in subjective data. Their results are already biased enough, they should take steps to fix that, not make it worse.
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You're probably not an American Christian, then, because at least half of American Christians believe in Creationism. Christians here would be insulted to be told the Earth is billions of years old.
Thanks but no thanks (Score:4, Funny)
I don't want my neighbors to find out about my obsessive and crippling fear of genetically engineered dinosaurs next time they do a search for "Toronto Raptors" from my computer.
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I don't want my neighbors to find out about my obsessive and crippling fear of genetically engineered dinosaurs next time they do a search for "Toronto Raptors" from my computer.
What do you get for "Chicago Bears"?
What's the point / they still bother? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Isn't Yahoo pretty much in the process of outsourcing their search to MS?
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Isn't Yahoo pretty much in the process of outsourcing their search to MS?
Have you seen bing search results lately? (That is -- if you can get past the "look at my first web site" graphics on the home page. ) They need all the help they can get.
Good luck with that (Score:1, Funny)
When I'm searching for pregnant-futanari-on-hermaphrodite-furry, I really mean pregnant-futanari-on-hermaphrodite-furry.
wow... Just, wow.. (Score:3, Informative)
A -- women -- ???
I see a FLOOD of this, women used where woman should be used and woman where women should be used.
Wow......
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Apparently search *wasn't* able to teach the author to spell. :)
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We are borg. Resistance is futile. Make us a sammich and give us your wallet, man-slave.
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Mkay?
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No, blame the laziness of people in general to learn proper English.
ftfy
I like a good yank bashing too, but I see just as much of this coming from the UK as from the US.
ROI at 7 Percent (Score:2, Interesting)
Mis-aligned demographic (Score:2)
They must have my demographic setting wrong. Half my searches for naked women come back with women's undergarment stores.
Joking aside, when you've got multiple people of different genders (such as in your average multifamily dwelling) using the same computer, such demographic results won't work too well. I wonder if this might explain, in part, why my search results really are less pertinent when I'm not signed into my gmail account.
Great button but shouldn't always work that way (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're searching for something where this would help - like home depot products and you fit the demographic you are in then great - add a button that keeps you in your area and helps you avoid german composers.
To me though, this would be very restricting if I'm truly trying to look up something I (and therefore maybe my demographic) knows just a little about. Steering me back to results that I already know about would get to be very annoying when what I am looking for isn't usually searched by my demogr
If you are surfing from France, you speak French.. (Score:1, Insightful)
... not!
When I was living in France for a while (job related), I was quite annoyed by all those websites that assumed that because my computer's IP was in France I wanted to see the site in French, even if the site was a .com and I explicitly tried to click the "English" link. (My French is good enough to buy some baguettes with rillettes, but not for reading technical articles.)
This goes into the same direction: It works in many cases but when it doesn't, it will piss off the user.
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It's OK, you don't need to give us an excuse.
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THIS! I too have major hate of forced localization, everytime I set-up a new browser and load up Google, it goes to google.de (I'm in Germany, I speak the language well enough, but I want the content that I want, you stupid f'ing websites!). Even worse is Comedy Central and their South Park clips, an English-language blog embeds a clip from a South Park from Comedy Central, I click play, and guess what happens? The clip is dubbed in German! Aaarrrrggghhh!!!
Also trying to read myspace profiles (why, why?) ge
highly dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
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> I'm also troubled by this trend in the way that google delivers their news
> offerings, it seems that the logical progression of this is that we will
> mostly only be exposed to material that fit our highly individualized
> pre-existing reality bubbles.
You don't have to be logged in to a Google account to use Google News or Google Search, you know (in fact, you needn't even accept cookies). As for the "highly individualized pre-existing reality bubbles", that's why people read Huffington Post/Fo
funny .... (Score:2, Insightful)
The first thing I thought of when I read Wagner was the popular brand of jeans.
There was/are gender predictors out there that will look through your search history and try to predict what gender you are. They were mildly successful (though dead wrong in my case). I think I prefer Google's more invasive yet more accurate method of paying attention to which results I click on and giving me more of the same without regard to gender or age. I DO like getting local results though.
As far as women vs woman goes
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It must be hard work trying to design search algorithms for dyslexics.
I don't want my search history examined. (Score:1, Interesting)
This is wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
Often someone will tell me in a forum to "search for x in google", what happens when the results are not exactly the same worldwide because of this technique?
Also, there are loads of people that use proxies and so on to search the web. (like people in china) Their demographics would appear all skewed because it would seem that someone in the proxy's country of origin is requesting to search for webpage x.
I don't agree with
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what would help is a simple way to toggle custom/standard searches and to see which way the toggle is currently set
There is already bias in search results (Score:5, Insightful)
The search results are not just a regex matching. A modern search engine, like Google's, returns a ranked list of search results to you, and this ranking already has bias: the Pagerank algorithm sorts the results based on how popular the page is, as measured by the number of incoming links to that page. Of course, that is the general gyst of Pagerank as of the Google founders' research paper back in the late 1990s, and undoubtedly Google and other search engines have fine-tuned their algorithms since then to return "better" results to the user. But the point is still that there is already bias in the results.
Make no mistake that Google has not already thought of similar search result ranking algorithms similar to that posed in this Yahoo Research paper. The difference is that Google does not have a research arm like Yahoo, so they do not publish ideas like this. In hindsight, the Google founders were foolish to publish their Pagerank algorithm in the first place, but they were still at Stanford then.
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The search results are not just a regex matching. A modern search engine, like Google's, returns a ranked list of search results to you, and this ranking already has bias: the Pagerank algorithm sorts the results based on how popular the page is, as measured by the number of incoming links to that page.
That's fine, because if I'm doing a two-word search, I probably want results that are more popular, rather than some random obscure websites that happen to contain those words. That's a perfectly valid way o
Cursor tracking (Score:1)
following the mouse cursor as a proxy for eye tracking
And if the user turns out to never touch the mouse? Keylogging every single character pressed? This is plain absurd.
When I think of Wagner (Score:1)
I expect something like this [youtube.com]
They could simply not save the info. (Score:3, Insightful)
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I actually like targeted advertising, as it helps me find out about things I may be interested in. However, I don't see why anyone needs to save any information long-term to do this. For instance, on a Google search, they shouldn't need anything more than my most recent search (or perhaps the searches I've done in the last few minutes, if I'm doing several searches with progressively-refined terms) to find things I'm interested in. I don't want ads based on searches I did two weeks ago.
I don't know exact
Sexist Search Engine Pigs! (Score:2)
What if I'm a woman and I WANTED the paint brand, huh? (Or a more pertinent issue, if I start looking up for MMO's and it tries to steer me towards Bella Sera or something instead of WoW?)
Seriously, this has "Bad Idea" written all over it, for the criticism levied against it for entrenching gender stereotypes if nothing else.
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Trust me, you DON'T want the paint brand. Wagner sprayers are total pieces of shit that only splatter paint all over, making a big mess. Read the reviews; they simply don't work as advertised. I think their whole business model is relying on people to listen to their ads and buy their crappy sprayers, try them out, find they don't work, and then throw in them in the trash because it's easier than taking an hour to clean up the sprayer to return it to the store.
The airless paint sprayers that actually wor
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In THEORY, man! In THEORY!
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Sorry, just trying to do what I can to steer people away from those horrible Wagners. I'm a very handy guy--between fixing houses, rebuilding car engines, and woodworking, I've done it all--and the Wagner sprayer is the biggest POS tool I've ever tried.
Can someone explain... (Score:1)
How are the search engines capable of doing this on their own? It needs to be remembered that almost 80% of internet users (in India at least), use dynamic IPs. Most ISPs here charge extra for static IP and most users just don't bother - what use would the average layman user have for a static IP? I'm assuming that's how it is in most other places too. Correlating searches and search patterns with demographic details needs active cooperation from all ISPs, isn't it?
And oh, thanks to the submitter for remind
Good option but a horrible default (Score:2)
How many times do we search for one keyword (or even a string), spelled exactly so? Just like in a library catalogue. The last thing we want is some algorithm applying an undocumented filter to our search results.
It's bad enough that Google insist on fuzzyfying that string (even when you put it between quotes), but when it starts interpreting my search intent bas
I don't want my search engine to tailor my results (Score:2)
I want the same damn results anyone else gets from making the same searches. Why would I want it any different?
I'm not searching for something I already know, I'm searching for something someone else already knows.
Difference between Yahoo and Google (Score:1)
Yahoo Research says: e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US "wagner" is a paint sprayer.
Google says: e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US "wagner" is a porn star
Gee, I wonder which one men are gonna use...
Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:2)
e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer
As would anyone taking or interested in Philosophy [wikipedia.org]. Of course this is an example of a terrible search query, like searching for "strange" without specifying "quark", but I'll take the generalized results all the same, thanks. Please don't tell me what I want.