• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Google’s new social search results: Media literacy opp

January 14, 2012 By Anne Leave a Comment

Google just added to its regular search results the posts, photos, etc. of your social circles, as they appear in Google+ (if you use it), YouTube, and other Google social products*. It’s called “Search, plus Your World.” Even though you and your kids can opt out entirely to get your Google searches back to the general results you’ve always gotten, the move has created a fairly predictable fracas. Some people love it, some hate it. “People do not necessarily want personal information appearing in search results, some said, while other said that Google was unfairly favoring its own social network over competitors like Facebook and Twitter,” according to a New York Times blog. The Gizmodo blog even said it changes the way search works by putting personal (subjective) results before relevancy, or “objective” results – though Google’s top results were always based on the number of people who found them useful. This makes the echo chamber smaller and more front and center, if you let it.

But there’s the key: “if you let it.” First of all, none of this works if you’re not logged in as a Google member, so Google search is basically the same if you aren’t or if you’re logged off. And, as I mentioned above, if you are logged in, Google provides a way to turn it off entirely (my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid explains how in a Forbes blog post). But here’s a great media literacy training opp: You can also see what your search results look like both ways – toggle back and forth between social and regular and compare the two, having a little discussion about the differences. You do this by logging into Google (via Gmail, YouTube, or whatever service), then going to Google search and searching for something. In the upper right-hand corner are two icons: a little globe and a little person. Click on the globe and you hide social search results, click on the person and the results from your social circle are on top.

So I don’t see any need for a big kerfuffle about this. You can always use a different search engine (Gizmodo sees this as a big boon for Bing), but I don’t think there’s much of a downside unless for some reason someone wants there to be. There’s that media-literacy training plus to it (to borrow your “plus,” Google) and – if you’re disconcerted about what Google turns up from your Facebook content, this may be a useful reminder to be less public in Facebook, if so desired. Because Google only turns up what’s public in your or your kids’ Facebook activities.

*Subscribers, I uploaded this over the US’s holiday weekend and have since learned that I misread the New York Times blog post cited above, by inferring that Facebook and Twitter results would be included in “Search, plus Your World” (see this thorough post from search analyst Phil Bradley in the UK, pointed out to me by Amy Jussel of ShapingYouth.org (thanks, Amy!). I do feel that focusing on activity in its own products in the social part Google’s search results downgrades the quality of its search product overall, if this is what the company’s doing, but I also believe that 1) Internet users have choices and can vote with their keyboards, 2) this is an excellent media literacy lesson, and 3) this may also be a business opportunity for non-promotional Web search.

Share Button

Filed Under: search, Social Media Tagged With: Google, personal search results, search engine, social search results, Web search

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Lawmakers, controlling and banning kids doesn’t help
  • New clarity on child sexual exploitation online
  • Game-changer: Child rights-by-design
  • Why I struggle mightily with the new Utah law
  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.