MANILA, Philippines — Back in the day, when you do a web search using Google, the results that were returned were rated based mostly on the relevance of the particular resources.

In addition, the results are pretty much consistent regardless of who you are, where you are searching from, etc. Today, Google is personalizing the results based on how much it knows you -- based on your online profile, i.e., your personal information, location, browser you are using, OS you are using, etc. Is this good or bad? You be the judge.

I tried searching for “China” using the same internet connection, on the same computer, but with two different browsers, Chrome and Safari. The results that were displayed were different.

On Chrome, I got China.org.cn as the first one, followed by Images from China, a Google+ friend entry about Chinatown, then a Wikipedia entry on China. On Safari, the Wikipedia entry was presented first, followed by an infoplease.com article on China, US State department entry on China, the ChinaToday.com page, Google Maps of China, China-window.com, and then finally china.org.cn. Not exactly the same despite the fact that it was done a few seconds apart, on the same computer. And oh, I was logged in on my Gmail account on both browsers. (Did the same on Firefox without logging in to Gmail and the results are different as well)

Isn’t Google supposed to give you the same results consistently, specially if did it within 2 seconds, on the same computer and same internet connection? I tried this on Bing.com and got the same results on both Chrome and Safari (maybe because I wasn’t profiled enough since I don’t use Bing at all).

What are the implications of having too much personalized results? As an educator, it is difficult to be able to say “Google the topic X”, thinking that what you saw on the internet when you did your search will be the same one that your students will get. In addition, how does it affect the very concept of discovery, if Google will filter results for you because they do not match your usual online behavior? Finally, is there still a standard world wide web, devoid of any personalization or big-company filtering?

To some extent, personalization is a good thing. However, for those who are fond of discovering and learning something new every time, I don’t think this is a good thing. Personally, I am looking for ways to access the old WWW -- do you know where it went?