Go ahead and google the word 'hotel.'
Chances are, you'll be bombarded with advertisements and recommendations about the best deals at the hotels closest to you. Then, maybe if you scroll far enough down you will see a definition for the word hotel or a Wikipedia site. If your cousin in another state googled hotel, what would their results be? What about your friend abroad, how would their search results differ?
Some more food for thought: When is the last time you've looked past the first page of results on Google? I know when I'm talking with a friend and we reach a topic that neither of us have information on, we do a quick Google search. And, generally we accept the first answer we find as the truth. But, if people don't often look past the first link think about how much power and influence that gives Google. Without being totally conscious of it, the order of Google search results shapes our perception of whatever we search for. And, if we are all getting different search results based on our previous search history that means that it can be easy to unintentionally give in to confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is "the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories." So, someone may think the first few Google search results they see are truthful because they align with their previous perception of the truth when in fact they actually contain false information. Instead, without these filtered results someone could search for something, find that the results challenge their previous views, and learn something new.
The algorithms that determine what search results you receive when using Google have been in the public eye for a while. Infamously, the influence of Google search results are often brought up in the discussion of the white supremacist Dylann Roof who is responsible for a mass shooting in a church in South Carolina. Many think that his exposure to misinformation returned after googling 'black on white crime' lead him into a rabbit hole of white supremacist websites and propaganda that ultimately influenced him to murder nine people.
I see looking something up on Google as similar to going to a library to get a book on a specific topic except there are a few key differences. First, say you are doing a research project on 'exotic birds.' If you go to the library, you can ask a librarian (an expert in finding reliable information) for help in finding some useful resources that will help you in your research. However, when you go online and search 'exotic birds' you get advertisements for pet shops and lists like '8 of the World's Most Exotic Birds' that are all one click away. Instead of having a trained librarian to guide you in sorting through information that job falls on you. And what a daunting task that can be! So much information now exists online that computer scientists have had to create new words to describe the vast amount of digital data .
Current estimates say that:
"There are approximately 44 zettabytes of data in the world in 2020. Given how much data is created every day, there will likely be 175 zettabytes by 2025."
Although you obviously wouldn't have to search through all digital data ever created to find out what you want to know about exotic birds, you get my point. There's a lot to look through.
But, there are a lot of people looking through it. In the time it takes to read this sentence there will have been 87,314 Google searches. Essentially a monopoly in the search engine market and the owners of YouTube, there is no denying that Google has a lot of power. Many people with access to wifi interact with a product of Google's daily. With this much power and influence I think that Google has a responsibility to mitigate the consequences of over-filtering people's search results. Although it makes sense to filter out some content based on geography and maybe even age range so that someone's search results are relevant, I do think there is a line with how filtered results should be. Someone should not have false perceptions of a topic they search just because the results most match what the Google algorithm determines what they most want to see. While I don't think it's fair to definitively say that the massive presence of Google is either all good or all bad, but it is important that Google and people who use Google realize how powerful of a tool this search engine can be.
For fun, check out this site to see how many tweets, emails, and other things have been sent viewed in the past second.