Sunday, June 12, 2011

The Information Cocoon

“The Filter Bubble: What Internet is hiding from you”, is a book just released by Eli Parisier with a very interesting view of SEO. According to the author, actually search engines are not optimizing our search since the information displayed for us is subjective of our tastes, interests and background. Since the real magic of SEO is that the system follows our paths through the Internet and thus selects the information that would probably most suit us, we are trapped inside an “information cocoon”. As Eli Parisier says it so brightly, “personalization filters serve up as a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

For Parisier, we should actually have more control of the data and Google should be more open with its algorithms. In my opinion, this is an oversimplification of how SEO works, since if interested, any type of information can be found online. Maybe it is not found in the first search, but the system can easily understand what your goal is after a few tries.

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