Restricted Info
“A filter bubble is a result of a personalized search in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user”-Wikipedia
Filter bubbles are used very often. We employ them in our life on the internet daily. They are used, so we are told to enable faster results. They record what we search and websites that we click in. The filter would get rid of the results that we “don’t want”. For this English project, we worked with students from Ohio and found the same searches conducted in different locations would provide different results. I used Google as my search engine and looked for: “U.S. sold weapons to Taiwan”. The results that I found are as follows:
My partner Pierre, had very similar results compared to mine. The biggest difference is the order of the results. I had CNN as my second result and New York Times as my third. While Pierre had New York Times as his second and CNN as his third result. Both of us had Wikipedia as our first result.
I then search on Australia’s Google by using the same sentence.
After doing these searches, I learned that every country has its own restrictions. I noticed the number of results in my searches was different between Australia and Taiwan. The search from Taiwan only had 10,800,000 results, while Australia had 11,200,000 results. I believe that this tells us a lot about how the internet works and how it limits information depending on where you are.
From this assignment, I have learned that searching results through Google can be very different for everyone mainly because of filter bubbles. We should be worried about this because filter bubbles shouldn’t control what we find, we should decide. I found out you can disable the search filter by using a web browser called TOR. This web browser can disable all the filters on the search engine and give no restrictions to the users.
Here is a video discussing the issue about filter bubbles.
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