The headline might be a bit dramatic but when browsing online a number of sites seem to have increasingly psychic powers, knowing what we want, or at least what we are more likely to want.

Search engines, social media sites, news sites, etailers… everybody’s at it and with good reason.

Search engines

The search engines are always striving to provide the results that we will want to click on. This is both to provide the best possible user experience possible and also to generate more revenue if that click happens to be on a paid search result.

Google personalised search is an effort to improve relevance. Search engines provide personalised search results by collecting data on our usage and behaviour as well as many other factors such as our location and the device we’re searching on.

Social media sites

Social media sites guess what we’re searching for, who we might want to connect to, who we’re going to want to chat to and see updates from etc. Check out this interesting (and slightly creepy) piece on who Facebook thinks you’re searching for.

Digital media sites

Media sites providing news, articles and video make personalised recommendations they think we will, probably, be interested in.

Online Retailers

Amazon have led the way on retailer personalisation with their suggestions but now it’s easy for all online retailers to provide personalised product recommendations with services like rich relevance.

Almost every other site…

Unless you’ve taken steps to prevent it any site with advertising space could show you personalised ads. Services such as Google Remarketing and Criteo can personalise ads based on the sites you’ve visited and products/services you have looked at.

But is it a good thing?

Now this is where it gets complicated.

My opinion on personalisation varies massively depending on the context, my mood and whether I’m at home or work.

If I do search for “cinema” while at home in Brighton then I probably want to see results from local cinemas.

If I visit a particular site regularly then when I perform a generic search that is relevant to content on that site then I probably want that sites content to appear higher up in the search results.

At work I love the extra dimension personalisation brings to digital marketing and so do many clients (particularly when smart personalisation strategies drive revenue).

So, personalisation is a good thing right?

Well not exactly.

The biggest problem with online personalisation is the cocoon/filter bubble/echo chamber, (whatever you want to call it) that can be created whether you want it to or not.

Most of the time when online we connect and engage with people and content that matches our existing interests, political views and belief structure. Algorithms then use this data to predict what we want to see and filter out the rest.

This creates an endless cycle of only seeing things you like, because you like seeing things like that, so you see will only see things you like (way too many likes in that sentence). And that means no more serendipity (look it up if you don’t know what it means).

There are two main problems with predicting what we are more likely to want. The first is that more likely doesn’t mean it’s what we want all the time.

I might really want to watch an interesting documentary on BBC Four but it’s more likely that I want to watch South Park.

The second reason is sometimes there are things we need to see not just want. I might want to read an article about Frankie Cokeupthenoza getting edited from TV ads but really I should be reading about the Eurozone crisis.

What we need is new ways of categorising.

We also need greater awareness and control over what we see and what gets filtered out.
Not mind reading.