Image from Technology Communication Gdpr – Free photo on Pixabay

From: Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research (author: Christine Gardiol), available on most AMAZON marketplaces

Google Search began providing personalized results to their users at the beginning of the 2010s, prompted by the web becoming too large to handle searches in a reasonable amount of time and, users being at a loss with the many retrieved results it provided them. The exponential growth in internet data, the so-called Big Data, was getting its users lost, jeopardizing at the same time, Google and its business model. For years, Google has been complaining about the crap that is flooding the internet. ChatGPT’s like tools that can create hallucinations have not improved the situation.


To personalize results, designers implement instructions to track users. This means engines, browsers and more generally any websites collect data about you, storing them in small text files, called cookies. Ben Lutkevich (TechTarget -What is a search engine? ) lists the most frequent data collected on users: user ID; device identification; IP address; location information; search history; search date and time; audio data; device diagnostic data; contact lists; purchase history.

For an exhaustive list of the data collected on users, make sure to visit the security.org website, especially a post on The Data Big Tech Companies Have On You . They extensively review Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple and classify the large sets of information they collect on us in the following categories:

  • Personal information (name, username, password, phone nbr, payment info, address…).
  • Unique identifiers (IP address, crash reports, system activity, browser type, device type, application version nbr…)
  • Activity (search terms, networks/connections, messages, content, videos watched…).
  • Location information (time zone, GPS, sensor data from device…).
  • Publicly accessible sources (local newspapers, third party marketing partners, advertisers…).

Big Tech companies track, save, and use what you do online (what you click, who you are, where you go) to offer you what they perceive you need. In the background, the machine guesses, interprets and predicts your intentions. Parts of your search strings might be ignored or rearranged, some terms added and, additional parameters considered, without any transparency for you. This is how many search engines have been operating this last decade. And Generative AI has made hyper-personalization an invasive reality, providing personalized offers and suggestions for content, services, and products that are said to closely match the needs and interests of users. This trend is sweeping the marketing and client service industries, beside the purely search engine sector. Personalized experience has become the buzzword. Websearch personalized marketing to get a sense of its scope.


Personalized results are not all bad. Some customization is nice. You appreciate the engine understanding what you need, even if you misspelled a world. Also, when you order a pizza for your diner, you prefer getting the links of providers close to your location, rather than on the other side of the earth.


Google and others justify their interventionist mode and the use of your personal data, by saying that they offer you a better online experience “results tailored for you based on your activity”, to quote Google . If the process looks attractive, it biases the information you consume. Personalization of our online experience means you lose control of your information. It has an especially important impact with significant research projects, where neutral, impartial and/or sourced results are indispensable. It is also a basic requirement of the scientific method.


From the perspective of the search results, personalized results mean that for an exact same search, the hits may differ between users and sessions, even if they type the exact same query in the same search engine, at the exact same time and place. Already in 2011, when AI techniques had not yet reached the sophistication of this new decade, the internet activist, Eli Pariser, highlighted the danger of personalized results in his famous TED talk on the “filter bubble”. He gave the example of a search “egypt”, googled by various of his friends around the world. The results were largely eloquent. Quoting the transcript: “…here’s my friend Daniel’s screen shot. When you put them side-by-side, you don’t even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it’s really quite remarkable. Daniel didn’t get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott’s results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That’s how different these results are becoming. “ .

According to Pariser, not only is the information biased, but more dangerously, we are confined, trapped and confirmed in our own values and knowledge; each of us is in its own information bubble. Rather than opening us to the universal library of information and knowledge, which was the big thing when the web and engines came out, they are closing us down. The results you now get comfort your beliefs, for good or bad. What about diversity and tolerance? The consequences are dangerous for our society as far as tolerance is concerned. Several manifestations of extremism in 2024 and 2025 seem to confirm a filter bubble hypothesis. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix, collectively known as GAFAM or FAANG, have a strong social responsibility toward humanity, which their desire for power and money probably obscures.

From: Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research, available on most AMAZON marketplaces