Yahoo! has come up with a new kind of personalization of search – Ideological search.
Scientists at Yahoo! today released Ideological Search, allowing users to control the ideology of their search results for the first time in search technology history. Until now, many Web search users were offended by the facts, pages, articles, and blogs in their search results that contradicted their own personal beliefs and values. Furthermore, search engines were often accused of being biased in one direction or another. Rather than try to comply with a hard-to-define “search fairness doctrine”, Yahoo! Ideological Search will allow its users to personally control the ideological perspective of their search.
It is interesting to read the way Yahoo! has implemented the system. It now has a platform called Clorocks to harvest the ideological information through user’s activities.
It is good that people will find more of what they believe in. Though it is too tempting to speculate if this will end up hiding useful information. When I search, most of the times I do not want the search results to have any bias, not even my preferences. Yahoo! seems have realized this and wants to build Yahoo! Me on top of this, a service that will guide users to take decisions. This might work well in verticals like job or house hunt, travel and education. Give it a try.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:13 am
You do realize this was posted on an April Fool’s Day, right?