I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her.
That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search.
The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize.
Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.
There's a bunch of anecdotal stories about personalization goes wrong, but I don't see how any of that is a strong enough point. Should you be equally given news about every local news from every city in the world? Should be equally given news about every sport and sport team? What if you don't even like any sports?
Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news.
I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows.
Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.
Yes what you describe is what I want. When I search I don't want my search influenced by search terms that are invisible to me and that I can't influence.
If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed.
What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.
I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her.
That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search.
The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize.
Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.