Have you ever experienced an "Internet Experience Bubble"

Have you ever done an internet search on a popular search engine for a controversial subject and your search return did not match a friend of yours living somewhere else but using the same search engine? Have you produced a web site covering a controversial subject and found that when you search for your site using popular search engines you can find it listed but others can't? If you answered yes to either of these questions you might be experiencing an "internet experience bubble" designed and built just for you.

Go into private mode on your browser and perform the same search using smartpage. If the search result is different than your regular search for the given search term then you again have evidence you are experiencing an "Internet Experience Bubble".

Since I have experienced this phenomena for some time I thought I would do this thread and share with ATS to see if I am alone in this experience.

I am posting a TED talk that first introduced this concept to me. I had noticed it prior but did not realize the scope of it or the terminology. Others may find it interesting so adding it to the thread.

a reply to: NihilistSanta

Wow. Highly relevant video, thanks for the video link. I am not alone. Thank goodness it is not my imagination.

a reply to: machineintelligence

Very interesting......i have experienced this myself but chalked it up as me going nuts.....worth further investigation....S&F

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

Thanks. I pretty much felt as you did but the Ted Talk that was linked into the thread pretty much explained the mechanical aspects of this phenomena. It is real. Its purpose is even touched on. It seems to be an automation of the gatekeeper aspect of media corporations to keep control of the subjects and topics of debate.

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

a reply to: machineintelligence

Excellent topic and excellent video from NihilistSanta. Flags and stars all around.

I was somewhat aware of this happening in google searches.

I got interested in the cryptography challenge Cicada 3301 last year. The site pastebin is used frequently for sharing data because it's easy and anonymous. A few of the people I talked with frequently got to comparing searches for different phrases on the site. We found that the results varied widely at times from user to user with several different searches.

It's never been easier to manipulate what end users see... plug in an algorithm and walk away.

a reply to: Ksihkehe

The gatekeeper options this technology holds the door open for are hard to ignore. It will I think become more widespread and harder to detect as technology progresses in this technology sector.

It is not exactly a secret that google does not work the same way it did 10 years ago.

Our search results are often targeted based on a variety of factors, like geography. With facebook open the results and your facebook ads will be even more targeted based on things like gender, age, relationship status, ect...

This is called profiling, and is used by search engines to rake in more profits from both you, and the sucker advertisers that pay for results.

When you advertise on Google, you use the AdWords program to bid for results in the paid ads column on a results page with your chosen keywords, you can also display on websites that show AdSense ads, hoping to get a click.

The whole system is a complete sham, if you put in some stupid, non profitable keyword, like "boring fart" the system will then claim that you are competing with several other bidders for your cherished keyword, and your bid of 10 cents will need to increase to $1.25 to compete.

The results tailored individually to you are part of what is known as retargetting, whereby the one thing that made Google the top search engine, goes completely out the window, and that thing is relevance.

Currently, all this technology is used to increase the search operators profits, or so we think.

We all know that our governments prefer to be in control of what we see, and hear, and it is only a matter of time before we are manipulated over power, rather that dollars. It may be happening now.

Peace

its a function of the tracking and profiling that happens now the search engine shows you what it thinks
you want based more and more on where you have been tracked to and searched for before.

as an example i found this yesterday i did a search for a garage to do the UK MOT test on one of
my cars and got a different set of responses between the search i did on my phone ans the one i did on
my desktop with an almost totally different set of top results yet i used the same search term
the only difference if my phone has a different user profile and e mail address set as its primary.

it is a pain in the rear.

Great topic and great TED.

And yes, even though I don't use the popular one all that often, there are times I forget or it resets to the default or I use it intentionally to check things exactly like what you are describing,

The times I notice it most, when it is most obvious is when I'm traveling. And even though I have "location" set off and clear cache and history, it still and it brings up my "local" items. I don't exactly get how that can happen even if one takes steps tp safeguard from this. I used to think that even if you turned your location off, it was by IP, which it still might be depending on what it's "reading" on my machine.

It's also very noticeable when a coworker tells me to look at what's on Yahoo News, and mine is different than his, based on...something. The Yahoo feed is always dead wrong for me. I could not care less about "celebrity" news and yet that is what they push at me most, even though I never do any searches or reading on that tripe. And the tailored "ads" are almost always 100% dead wrong for me.

And I loathe and despise the idea that a machine or code even thinks it can attempt to think "for" me or filter for me of anticipate what I want to "see" and when. In fact it angers me. A lot. I don't want to be in a bubble of one.

a reply to: machineintelligence

You are not alone. I spent years searching for a specific set of keywords, believing, due to total lack of any information after various searches, that I was the only person in the history of earth to have experienced a very peculiar and specific event.

Two weeks ago I opened YouTube on my phone, via the app link available in Android. I was flooded by 'suggestions for videos you might like' which revolved ENTIRELY around the same core concepts that I had been trying to locate information on for literally over five years. And these were OLD YouTube videos, very old. To say I was pissed off would be an understatement. I even bitched about the subject to my wife, though not revealing the actual search terms or results I had obtained. Following that incident, I located even more corroborating evidence regarding the subject particulars, with ease, and with 'Easter eggs' which seemed to demonstrate that certain pages & videos had been carefully edited for the purpose of continuing a personal 'narrative'.

I will now watch the embedded TED talk video. Due to various pieces of information arising over the last year or so, I came to realise that I live in a perpetual internet bubble. Not only is my ability to access certain subjects blocked - but certain subjects are 'pushed' my way, leading to various multiple convergent strands of information that paint quite a unique picture when considered in light of each other - a particular narrative. Narratives are a big deal in psy-ops.

originally posted by: machineintelligence
Have you ever done an internet search on a popular search engine for a controversial subject and your search return did not match a friend of yours living somewhere else but using the same search engine? Have you produced a web site covering a controversial subject and found that when you search for your site using popular search engines you can find it listed but others can't? If you answered yes to either of these questions you might be experiencing an "internet experience bubble" designed and built just for you.

Go into private mode on your browser and perform the same search using smartpage. If the search result is different than your regular search for the given search term then you again have evidence you are experiencing an "Internet Experience Bubble".

Since I have experienced this phenomena for some time I thought I would do this thread and share with ATS to see if I am alone in this experience.

It is widely known that search engine results are always tailored to the user based on a number of factors. There is no "phenomena" or conspiracy.

Yeah, but how do they do it? It used to be that you could escape their nonsense to a point, control it via your computer or your phone, by doing some of what I mentioned.

Yet that is becoming less and less possible as how they track you and how they build the machines is blocked from our reach, in clouds and in massive databases that watch for you to make just one slip to identify who you are.

And soon we will have no control at all.

I had chalked it up to Google relevance also but had noticed that years ago before Google you would get more search results that returned individually developed pages but since then it caters more to bigger sites. That may not be the issue here but it was what had caused me to take note. Then I had noticed when I was using multiple computers my results were different and figured this was due to cookies etc. Then there was an article in Forbes showing how travel sites were giving mac users higher priced results on the assumption mac users had more money to spare. This is just an example and not entirely like the OP but shows how "tailoring" can be used to manipulate.

The WSJ notes:

The sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people’s browsing data can be used to boost online sales.

Mac users are also 40 percent more likely to book a four or five-star hotel compared to Windows users, and when Mac and Windows users book at the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms, the WSJ also reported.

Bottom line, if you’re a Mac user, Orbitz isn’t showing you the best deals.

Mac Users Have Money to Spare, Says Orbitz - Forbes

So the question is , how do we get out?

Another example of this ive seen is on 9/11 every year when you type 9/11 in the yahoo search none of the conspiracy sites will show in the same order as a normal day, they will all be much deeper down the list so the average joe doesnt get a clue ....peace

a reply to: ziplock9000

It's not just search engines tailoring search results to serve up ads. The non ad results are skewed as well. Beyond search engines I have experienced this type of thing using different DNS servers. My ISP DNS serves up very different sites compared to Open DNS for instance. If I try to connect to certain sites on my ISP DNS the site would time out. When I would use Open DNS the site in question loaded no problem.

If someone can not reach a site because it times out that site will experience fewer users and might go under because ISP's are effectively choking it off. I put Open DNS in all my routers and portable devices. I experience a far less filtered internet as a result but most people do not do this so the big ISPs effectively can decide what you can see and hear.

a reply to: machineintelligence

The internet is just like any other media. For some reason though, people expect it to be beyond the reach of those entities who compete for your attention and seek to manipulate your thinking. Just like your tv set tells you what to eat and wear via commercial ads, and what the "truth" consists of via news, the internet is subject to the same forces. Surf carefully and try not to be fooled along the way.