From what I gather Google changed the SUL into a personalized version. If your interest and interaction profile matches some user´s post, he or she will be recommended to you.
However it´s not that personal as it seems to be a relatively small number of profiles which fits lots of new signups so it creates a new, more democratic and tailor-made Suggested User List. The people on it report about hundreds to thousands of new followers a day.
+CircleCount showed today that the new system mostly benefits US G+ users, with Canada and the UK following on a large distance and users from other countries being mostly neglected https://plus.google.com/111487545374003509241/posts/JuA4KWrW9oN
So there is a filter at the moment favoring the US, but apart from that there is also that more subtle filter bubble famously introduced by +Eli Pariser who explained in a Ted talk that Google will serve you the results you like, not the ones you´re asking for. As a Democrat he got more ´democrats pleasing´ search results than another user who sympathized with the republicans.
(if you missed it; http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)
The problem of all these match-making algorithms is that they actually do work for most people. You get the results and now also the people you probably like. It´s a pity though that the chances to meet a worthy opponent of your views are getting slimmer and slimmer.
If you would welcome a lively debate, its actually a loss if you don´t get introduced to the views of intelligent Republicans (yes, they exist) or f.i. of Apple tech posters if you happen to be a left-leaning Android user.
How do you feel about this tightening up of circles and opinions you actually get exposed to by algorithmic filter bubbles? #SocMed
I think that our lives are enriched by interactions with people who differ from us, different perspectives, different viewpoints. It may take some more work to find those people under this new SUL system, but the effort is worthwhile.
Good post +Max Huijgen. Spot on as regards the algorithm-driven results. You may recall my post a while ago where I demonstrated that using an 'incognito' or 'private browsing' window, or logging out altogether, shortens research time significantly. Indeed, often one will never find the searched for results in Google whilst signed in.
<edit> meant to tag +Max Huijgen rather than +Richi Jennings . My apologies guys! </edit>
I think meeting a worthy opponent is the realm of social media, not search. Yes, you might not find an opponent in a SUL or in search. But you will definitely encounter different thinking when conversing with people on G+. 6 degrees of separation can't be changed by an SUL.
Right on +Ryan Schultz I would like to have a profile flag saying ´I actually like different views so please introduce me to them´
Certainly +Colin Lucas-Mudd logged in search is next to worthless for research. The first sensible result is on page 3 or like you say never found.
+Max Huijgen interesting… we'll see if it actually changes anything about the original, deleterious SUL dynamics (all AKA cat pictures and nerd meme tripe, all the time…).
As to the question of the filter bubble, so far I haven't seen anyone extra show up for my #econ type posts…
There may be more irony in this than meets the eye. In my memory, traditional media's self destruction started when they were taken over by people who really, really wanted to understand and please the client instead of challenge them with a professional product.
Indeed +Alex Schleber. Mind you, as you may have noticed, yesterday I uncovered the true culprits of the #caturday conspiracy. 🙂
Oooh now there's a title waiting for a best-selling book to be written: "the Caturday Conspiracy" 😉
Thanks +Max Huijgen , hadn't heard about this.
yay! about time!
You actually want the safety of the bubble +steph wanamaker?
+Max Huijgen ill try it may not be perfect but its better than the way it was before
oh, no doubt it´s better than the old SUL which always insisted I should follow +David Beckham 🙂
But I noticed you share to extended circles now +steph wanamaker so do you prefer the safety/comfort of the communities and the liked-minded?
If I am on the list – I will like it… if not I just want people to be able to easily connect with me if we have similar interests… whatever makes that easier plus good posts that interest people should equate to more followers for all…
Sure +Brent Burzycki It will also depend on the exact nature of the algorithm. +Yonatan Zunger is not at liberty to tell us, but like-mindedness could be stretched to ´happily engaging with people with opposite views´ in which case it would work for me as well.
+Max Huijgen Great approach to this G+ change. I will share this with my "Googlish Folks" Circle and ask them to check in here. The actual Google employees need to know that many of us have a need for "neutral" search as well as persona-enhanced search. They also need to know how the changes affect our non-Google sensibilities here on G+.
Personally, I like just enough "artificial serendipity" to keep my G+ Stream interesting and engaging, and to learn from diverse views. I don't think it's always possible to learn from completely opposing views, not via text comments in social media. I did not sign up for G+ to engage in the previous decade's online argumentation style.
Hmmm, Google is neither serving me the results I like nor the ones I’m looking for at the moment:-(
. I will be patient and wait…..
but rumor has it that you´re on the list +Eileen O'Duffy
+George Station I very much like the idea of them very transparently offering both options: Filter-bubbled, and "Raw", without loggin out of Google (I know they have such a button in the upper right-hand corner, but is it truly the same as "raw" (different browser, no sign-in or cookies), or just with the G+/Social results removed?
+Alex Schleber I wonder if it's possible to get a straight answer to that one. I wonder if the Google proper and G+ search teams would agree.
So where is this new and improved SUL?
Marking for later…
My own strategy for following is still my favorite. Search on posts by topic and take note of the people who write interesting comments. That is, I don't pay any attention to Google's suggestions. I actually use my own powers of discrimination in selecting whom to follow.
Surely noone who's been here more than five minutes uses the SUL? The only reason I ever saw for it was to grab ten or so randoms so as not to have a totally empty feed. After that, its engagement, personal recommendations, and now communities that flesh out your circles. So basically, I don't care who they put on it, or what black magic they use to pick them.
Ah, so this explains why about 2,000 people have added my Page +Singularity 2045 to their circles over the past week. I think it is good idea, although I do get much better interaction from followers who very specifically-deliberately search out my Pages or profile. "However it´s not that personal as it seems to be a relatively small number of profiles which fits lots of new signups so it creates a new, more democratic and tailor-made Suggested User List. The people on it report about hundreds to thousands of new followers a day."
I'm intrigued to know what a general interest user, like myself for example, would need to do to appear in the SUL. How much weight is placed on content vs interaction in posts?
No idea +Michelle Cameron as the algorithm is +Yonatan Zunger´s secret.
The better question is how general interest posters like myself as well, can be matched to people as they usually don´t have a clear profile unlike say ´photographers´, ´tech posters´, ´news sharers´ etc.
Presumably the new SUL will contain mostly profiled, selective posters.
It's a tricky one +Max Huijgen and probably the algorithm for selection to SUL is as complicated as search result listing. I wonder is authorank is used?
Don´t think author rank is involved as relatively unknown people have been ´promoted´ and see a huge influx of followers.
Where o where is Yonatan's evil twin to share all the juicy details of how it works :-))
Personally I think that semantics with regards to the suggested user list should have been there from day one. It has been a major weak point of Google+. The filter bubble, and much of the talk about it is FUD, the biggest detractors are spammy SEO types. I consider relevancy far more critical than anything, and I would prefer not to be exposed to junk, or individuals I have not interest in (read: celebrities). This is a major improvement for plus, and +Yonatan Zunger and the plus team should be applauded. Semantics is critical…because irrelevant information, or people, is ultimately just spam.
+Christine Paluch absolutely. Getting rid of spam on g+ is such a huge deal. I'm noticing it particularly with comments that automagically disappear, and it's a breath of fresh air not to have a system like FB where every meme is for a page that just wants likes – I believe for a profitable sale later.
+Max Huijgen I have to say that I'm not sure how I feel about this. If I want views opposed to mine I might go looking for them but I also prefer to have like minded people recommended to me.
I also admit that I am benefiting in a small way from the new changes. Instead of an average of 50 new followers a day I'm now averaging 150. While I love the uptick, my US based counterparts are gaining 5'000 a day. That makes it impossible for me to compete with them. There is a certain amount of credibility that people associate with follower count. In photography this roughly translates to , "He / she" is a great photographer because they have more than x followers". The US photographers recently added to the SUL went from around 60'000 followers to 100'000 followers in a week. From a business perspective, they are more marketable then me since I "only" have 63'000 followers.
+Charles Lupica There is something disconcerting and sad about that even though I know that's how the world works.
Looking at all the faces on the suggestions area and I haven't seen this many white people since I made a wrong turn and ended up at a country club.
+Max Huijgen I don't know if this plays into your discussion, but I just realized that I am seeing different things in my two G+ presences. I am seeing significant (for me) adds here. They are orders of magnitude fewer than what the very popular are seeing, and still enough for me to notice. But my on-campus educator presence is seeing business as usual. That presence is not very interactive beyond campus boundaries, so it could mean that G+ is working as designed.
+James Barraford I've learned to dig around G+ in other ways. Were you here in the early days when recommendedusers.com was supposedly the go-to source for variety? I hope the G+ SUL powers learn from that, and don't take your comment too personally.
At this stage in the game I would settle for Google Plus pages and functionality that didn't diappear for between minutes and hours at a time, possibly while the much vaunted Google cloud/cache/rodents carrying messages has replication or caching problems.
The indignity of being a very remote colonmial outpost of the imperium, I suppose.
As for SUL, we are all Amerikaners here, ain't we.
Just back from a dinner party +Max Huijgen so will read in the AM
Cheers
Lee
+Lee Smallwood happy saturday
The real question here is what Google is optimizing for with these new algorithms. You know that there are some goals there, driving these changes. So the real question is what those goals are.
Here's my best guesses:
1) Build the world's most valuable shared interest graph. The shared interest graph is the intersection between the social graph and the knowledge graph. A very nuanced maps of the topics that connect us. These new algorithms are really just tests of how good Google is at their guesses here, and it is brilliant because it has a built-in feedback mechanism: how often we actually circle the people they suggest.
2) Improve on-boarding of new users. If I can come into Google+ and instantly get a rewarding experience with lots of engagement with people who share my interests, I'm much more likely to stay. Also, building more peer-to-peer links strengthens and diversifies the social graph here; it makes the overall network of connections denser on average, and makes it way less reliant on a relatively small stable of super stars. Facebook, with its built-in friendship graph totally kicks Google+'s ass on this front still. Twitter's not even in the game.
There are probably other goals I'm missing here. This is just my initial take. I think the filter bubble is an issue, to be sure. My sense is that there really needs to be an override capability. The ability to turn off that filter when we want to see the more objective reality – even though we all know that that too is a mirage.
+George Station I've been on G+ since Day 2 and yes.
My comment was semi-joking… well mostly kind of joking. Well, not really. 🙂
I won't be on the Google+ SUL anytime soon.
+Max Huijgen I am not from US and is a beneficiary by a factor or 106.5 (reference +CircleCount post), Having said that it does benefit mostlu US users but that is probably because I think more US users are using the facility (and I have most followers in US and I follow mostly US people and am basically part of the same crowd at least on G+), I have recently started looking at the new people following me. They are not absolutely novices (they also have followers), but are relatively inactive (compared to us) because they dont make much public posts. But they are more active than most of my friends in real world. The new users are coming from the Find People menu as observed by +Onkar Singh Gujral They gave ramped up this option. It would serve well for everyone to have a look at this tab. But getting followed in this fashion is a hit and miss since it is more like a beauty pageant rather than an elaborate selection process.
I'm terrified of whenever google decides to pollute Images results, that's basically the only seemingly unbiased bit left. 🙁
I've switched to using Bing to search news – they handle trending stuff beautifully and give me a slider I can use to pick my news bias dynamically.
+Angyl Bender While serious users have to be aware of the possibility of biases from iterative algorithms, changing one search engine to another does not make the problem go away. Vast majority of users simply want something useful quickly and are not too bothered about how they get there. Algorithms of these kind are very good for that since people vote with their clicks although they may not satisfy the purists demand of unbiased reporting. Short doing your own search, you can search multiple independent search engines but leaving google for anything else is not going to remove the filter effect (just change one for something potentially worse). There was a recent report that Search users are much more likely to be find phishing and malware infected sites on Bling as compared to Google. God save you if you are using an Internet Explorer
Different people have different use cases in different contexts, no? I specified google IMAGES because as of yet for certain use cases it gives me substantially different results than Google's main search does, and those use cases almost all involve things which my social ties andor purchase / browsing history have absolutely no relation to, like looking for the specific part number or related schematics for a thing I need to fix or replace. Now, I might go looking to buy that part after I've investigated whatever problem I'm digging into, but page after page of places to buy the thing the part is in, and reviews of the product by hot consumer sites is absolutely not what I want. I keep a browser not logged in to google handy as well, but it still doesn't hit that case on basic google as well as images.
Now, I could go on with other cases, but the thing they all have in common is they're rather specific UNsocial long-tail searches of the kind Google has done best for many years now, and BECAUSE I have already had to roll to Images to get what I need earlier in search, I am terrified of that changing because then I know of NO WHERE I can get that need served.
For my use case of news and trending things, Bing News does the job of giving me what I want. When I see a thing trending, I want to know 1) what is it 2) why is it trending 3) what is the general range of sentiment about it. Bing News has consistently been getting better at that over the past 6ish months. They even apparently crawl the links in the twitter and FB live streams and seem to somehow use that with some kooky deduping to give me a very good summary of all 3 questions in one place, very rarely do I have to do any extra click work unless I want to dive in. Google's info boxes, when they show up, are also very good summaries, but I find Google News lacking and waaaaay too biased to match my majority-friends' politics (which I'm not the best match for in a lot of cases) unless I'm logged out. Google's Voice-based search is my go-to on my phone if my hands are busy, it totally blows away anything else I try for understanding me, and if I hit an info box having it read to me is magical, making it great for earlier case 1) without having to stare at the phone and type. But if I do have my hands free and I'm looking for "the best burger in Greenwood" Bing has developed a better hit record for that in my trials.
I'm just a user. I don't really care what brand I get what I need from, I'm more interested in getting whatever I'm after done. I use many different devices and solutions, usually in a pattern where I'll use whatever is handy until it doesn't work well enough and I need something more specific, and I really only keep track of specific things for specific purposes when they reliably stand out because I had to interrupt what I was trying to do to get something more specific. I wind up using a variety of browsers, devices, login states, etc, because that's just a part of how my day rolls. This generates a great many small experiences of wins and misses. Thus my original comment – I reliably wind up on G Images for long-tail search and Bing for trends and news, because they give me what I am after.
+Max Huijgen Obviously FB and twitter are not giving google their data and hence the G+ effort. Since I find twitter shallow (although superior for real time breaking news sometimes), and Facebook frivolous, I would be better off without it. Since I understand G+ better, I can "get" what google might do with G+ which is perfect with me. There are of course certain tasks which need unbiased search result, where you wont be going to either bling or google anyway. In such situations you want all the data and not the rankings
+Able Lawrence i guess you wanted to mention +Angyl Bender?
+Max Huijgen yes I did
+Able Lawrence – maybe a naive question but where do you find the 'factor' number – the 106.5 you mentioned?
+Able Lawrence – sorry my stupidity – I found it now.
post by +CircleCount +Ward Plunet I guess.
Thanks +Max Huijgen .
Check here https://plus.google.com/111487545374003509241/posts/JuA4KWrW9oN +Ward Plunet
Thanks +Max Huijgen – yes that is the one I found also.
I personally feel…. oh wait a sec. I have posted and shared tomes of data on this very topic you know what I think +Max Huijgen. Simply put, I do think there is a better way to do it.
Yip +David Bowden I know, you know, there is a better way and I agree but we both knew this 😉
I'm getting people across the board – Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Atheists, whoever. While Google definitely presents you with what they think you want (and they happen to think wrongly in my case), I'm not sure that is what is happening here.
To much crap G+, what are you trying to achieve?
+Steven Baker If it is crap what are you doing here?
Oh my God another organizer, maybe it will lead you to the white house. Where you can also just carry on G.W.'s policy of murder for resources, while all the kooks believe your change bull. What has he been doing over the last five years, besides expanding the War machine into Libya, Egypt and now Syria, and I fear next Venezuela. And creating more debt than all past Presidents combined, it's change.
+Steven Baker So another angry young (?) man
Able have you become just another soft and spinless old man, too afraid to step up and voice the truth as you once knew. Why the question mark, are you now too old to be sure of the words you use to disparage me.
I am not too young and not too old. I have ruffled enough feathers in my life. No point in putting people off too much online where people have the option of turning off (unlike face to face). Calibrated provocation is the key. You might pretend it is useless but definitely enjoy other people s reactions.
I'm interested in the feathers you claim to have ruffled enough, please expand on your comment so that I as well as others can obtain a clearer picture of the man behind the statement.