Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many awesome online communication and collaboration tools they provide.

In this talk, I learned that sites like Google and Facebook actually skew your search results to show you different information based on what they think you’ll like. The speaker shows how different people got different Google results when searching for “Egypt” in the wake of the politial protests there this spring. Rather than giving you an accurate view of hits relevant to your search, these sites favor certain sites over others in an attempt to show you content it thinks you’ll like.

Seeing this talk reminded me of the billboard I recently saw near the Bay Bridge in SF, loudly proclaiming:

The Experiment

I decided to go Google-free for a week and use DuckDuckGo for all my searching needs to see how different the search results would be.

I did a very interesting little experiment: I searched “income inequality” in DuckDuckGo vs Google (see links for results). I didn’t see much difference in the search results until I noticed a search result in DDG that I don’t agree with– that Income  Inequality “doesn’t matter“. Anyone who knows me (and who knows me better than Google?) would take it for granted that I think income inequality is a problem. Of all the different things one could say about income inequality– I thought we (as a society) were all on the same page that it’s not a good thing. I probably fit squarely inside some Google framework of a Bay Area, liberal educated white middle-class NPR listener who would be shocked and horrified by such callous libertarian thought. I think this is part of what the speaker in the TED talk was getting at– that internet filtering removes viewpoints that challenge our own. My time with DDG is making me wonder if my search results help reinforce my certainty that my view of reality is the correct one.

This little revelation led me to try the mother of all divisive search terms: “Abortion”.

If I had any uncertainty at all about this important decision, I would rather be looking at search pages that don’t make that decision for me ahead of time, wouldn’t you? Now of course abortion is an extreme example, but the fact that DDG returns such diverse search results gives you an appreciation for how many different perspectives there are on reality, and how that diversity can look in search results.

So What?

Like me, you may not worry much about the profiles that companies are amassing about you. It does seem to be a small price to pay for the incredibly useful tools like Google Docs, Facebook, and Google search. However, these services are making lots of money collecting and selling your personal data to advertisers– Lifehacker aptly puts it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. While I have (so far) felt ok opening myself to this kind of vulnerability, it gives me pause to think that I’ve been recommending that my students do the same. Is this responsible for teachers to do when the real-world consequences of exposing personal data are not fully understood? Will we one day find ourselves regretting that we gave up so much of our personal data to cloud companies, and when we do, will we feel responsible that our students did it too? Should teachers seeking students’ liberation and empowerment be on the vanguard of software efforts that preserve and enhance user liberty and control such as Diaspora, FreedomBox, LockerProject, and Free/Libre Open Source software?

Aside from privacy issues though, the Orwellian issue of how our experience on the web is distorted has implications for students’ development of critical thinking skills. Central to critical thinking is the idea that reality can be viewed from very different lenses and perspectives. If our search engines and social networks (for many, their web portal on the world) provide us with a distorted view of reality, do we lose the ability and the desire to consider divergent viewpoints from our own? If students’ online experience can be tailored to their tastes like an iTunes Genius playlist, what are they missing out on? Where is the chance to see the unexpected, the infuriating, and the serendipitous? Don’t we have a right to steer them towards experiences that push them out of their comfort zones? And if so, should we be starting with the search engines and software tools that they will depend on after they’ve left our classes?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

Related articles

• DuckDuckGo Brings Private Searching And Zero Click Results To Android (androidpolice.com)
• Should Google and Facebook Be Filtering Our Content For Us? (webpronews.com)
• DuckDuckGo Questions Quality, Accuracy Of Search Engine Traffic Numbers (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google’s New Search Layout Test: Borrowing From Blekko & DuckDuckGo? (searchenginewatch.com)
• DuckDuckGo: popular search engines don’t offer true search results (geek.com)
• DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info API (mashape.com)

When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this excellent work in my own work. My favorite search engine for this task is Yahoo Image search because they have access to the whole Flickr.com library (probably the biggest repository of Creative Commons images in the world).

Searching this treasure trove of images usually involves several steps of setting up an Advanced Image search, selecting all the options I need, and finally searching away.

Thanks to this great tutorial from MakeUseOf.com, I learned how to dial in my ideal Creative Commons Image Search and save it as a simple keyword, so I can invoke it quickly. I just type “YI” and My Chrome Omnibar becomes a Yahoo Image Search for Large and Wallpaper sized Creative Commons photos. AWESOME!

Follow the directions in the MakeUseOf article to make your ideal custom image search (or whatever you need!)

Related articles

• Google Chrome Cheat Sheet: 10 Tips and Tricks (nsclive.wordpress.com)
• Get Around Chrome Custom Search Engines with a Forward Slash [Annoyances] (lifehacker.com)
• Quickmarks for Google Chrome makes bookmark keyword launching easy (downloadsquad.switched.com)
• How does a Creative Commons Share-Alike license on an image affect a web design that image is used in? (ask.metafilter.com)
• How to Use Creative Commons to Add Images to Your Blog (hubspot.com)
• CC News: Creative Commons for Japan Relief (creativecommons.org)
• Honing My Digital Storytelling Projects (lanceriley.wordpress.com)

I’m sure there are as many ways to use this as there are teachers. I have used it to advance my classroom presentations, as well as to update my online gradebook from the back of the room. It’s good for attendance, too, but the greatest benefit is the shock and awe your geekitude will inspire from your students.

See my Google Notebook here.

GNotebook puts all my clips together in a blog format that I can organize by topic. I can just direct students to go there to read the reading of the day or research my preselected list of sites so they don’t waste time searching aimlessly.

GNotebook and Clipmarks have different strengths that are well discussed here. I think it’s an extremely handy tool for busy teachers who want to easily maintain a dynamic website and bring kids along on our web travels.

This year, I talked our charter organization’s IT master into switching all our (5) schools and the main office to Google Apps for your Domain. This means that our schools don’t have to maintain their own email servers anymore…. all of the backend is provided by Google, although we still keep the our own domains (like envisionschools.org). Now our email is as powerful as Gmail and we’re all automatically linked in Google Calendars, Docs, Talk, Pages, and so on. It has enabled the organization to standardize how we communicate, and it’s an easy sell because it’s FREE to do, it improves email reliability, and it frees your IT people to work on other problems.

Since it’s free, we even rolled out email addresses for all students at our domains which has helped facilitate EVERYONE being connected to shared GDocs, Gmail, and GTalk. Here is their sales blurb

______________________________________________________________________

Google innovation. Powerful solutions. Zero investment.

Imagine
how valuable it would be if your entire campus community — students,
faculty, and staff — could share information and ideas more easily.
With Google Apps Education Edition’s free communication, collaboration
and publishing tools, including email accounts on your school’s domain
(like student@your-school.edu), you can start bringing that vision to
life. Learn more

You
can select any combination of our available tools and services and
customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content.
Manage your users through a web-based control panel, or use the APIs to
integrate Google Apps into your existing systems.

Best
of all, it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software
to download, install or maintain. You can get up and running quickly
with minimal support from your IT staff. Learn how

Communicate and connect			Collaborate and publish			Manage your services
	Gmail Email with 6.699276 GB of storage per custom email account, mail search tools and integrated chat.			Start Page Access your inbox, calendar, docs and campus info, plus search the web from one place.			Control Panel Manage your domain and user accounts online.
	Google Talk Free text and voice calling around the world.			Google Docs Create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time.			Extensibility APIs Integrate with your existing IT systems or 3rd party solutions.
	Google Calendar Coordinate meetings and school events with sharable calendars.			Google Sites One-stop sharing for team information.			Help and support Online troubleshooting and extended hours phone support for critical issues.

Learn more about the applications available through Google Apps.