Filter Bubbles: The Shape of the Nightmare to Come

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This is a short video (10:55) that Dr. Layman posted on Tuesday with some pretty sobering thoughts about how search engine algorithms as they currently operate are significantly contributing to (I like this term for it) cyber-Balkanization.

Oh great...the internet on course in becoming a confirmation bais brain washing "machine"...<sigh>

That is all we need...
More people who can't critically/objectively analyse/discriminate/differentiate because their brain has been conditioned into a thinking rut...

I use 2 computers and have wondered why I get different search results on both...

Question: Would VPN overcome this problem if it produced a dynamic/constantly-changing IP address?
Sounds like we need to use it right now...

I've watched this phenomena form. Search engines used to generate very different results than they do today. Today, search engines are commercially oriented. When they first appeared on the internet, Yahoo was best match oriented and Google was popularity oriented. Google then later switched to a more similar orientation as Yahoo, however both of them started giving precedent to the big brands while also orienting results based on a user's location, search history, and suspected demographics, and small personal websites seem to have all but disappeared from the listings. While it's true that personal websites these days are less common than they were at one time, they are likely not less common than they were in the early days of the internet.

What news stories one sees is often also determined by browsing history, location, and suspected demographic. Most people think clearing their browser history is enough but it's not. Your browsing habits are saved elsewhere.

Oh geeze...I knew that search engines had gotten incredibly dumbed down over the past ten years or so, but I didn't realize just how bad it was getting. I know I always get frustrated because even when I know exactly what website I'm looking for, no amount of quotation marks, or + or - keywords, will convince ANY search engine that I'm not looking for what they think I want to search for. You can't even type a single letter into a search bar without the engine guessing what you're typing, and giving you "popular" suggestions. Google is even giving their dirty secrets away, by bolding keywords, and showing you in the page preview that they thought maybe you weren't searching for exactly -this- word but maybe you were looking for synonyms, or homonyms, or words that contain some of the same letters, so we took the liberty of searching for all of those words as well.

You're welcome.

Becoming? It's been this way for a long time, how do you think Trump won the election? =/

Internet use has been this way for many years. I think the only way to avoid it is to use anonymous browsing apps. But that does not solve the social problem of filtering and bubbles. Balkanization. Good word for it.

His sexy wife and daughters...
Duh...



But as I said, wouldn't a dynamic IP address via a VPN do the trick in *resetting* the filter?

I'm not sure that it would. I think most filters would get confused and just show you less content. I know I've had a few times where my FB feed was completely blank.

There's an alternate Google site that's supposed to be a lot more "private", but I forgot to check it out, and now I can't remember what it was called.

Google has become quite bad...perhaps not for the average person, but I've noticed it more often shows what it thinks one might be looking for based on popular concepts, rather than what is actually typed into it. Quite horrible in my opinion.

Is there a better alternative to Google?

Yahoo used to be the better alternative to Google and Metacrawler used to be the better alternative to both of them because it would combine results from all of the main search engines at the time, however those days are no more. There are perhaps better search engines out there but I don't know of them.

Bing was way better for a long time, and then Google started copying Bing, and so Bing started copying Google, and now it's just awful =|

I usually use both, since Bing seems to ignore "quotations", and Google ignores any - or + used. So one might find what the other cannot.

I've tried a few alternatives, but wasn't happy with any of them. I used to use Search.com all the time back in the day, and I may have used Alta Vista as well.

https://www.startpage.com/

Returns results from Google but anonymously so you don't have the bubble problem. It also doesn't track you and you can view the results via a proxy so the pages you visit don't know your IP address.

There's also https://duckduckgo.com/ but I haven't used that one for a while.

Ha, I just came here to post that I think Startpage is the one I was thinking of, and you beat me to it.

I was using Duck Duck Go the other day when I was having Internet issues. It doesn't seem to return a lot of results, but I didn't use it very long.

Thought that might have been the one you were thinking of! That's why I don't use Duck Duck Go anymore, better results with Startpage.

Thx m8...
Any recommendations which VPN to use?

I've only tried one VPN so far. Been using Mullvad for a few months. The only problem I've had is that I can't get their client to work on Windows 7 if I'm not signed in as an administrator. That might be a problem on my end though and it works with OpenVPN anyway.

Apparently VPN speed can vary depending on where you live but I haven't noticed any speed issues with Mullvad in the UK. thatoneprivacysite has a lot of useful information on different VPNs. Took me ages to decide on one!