
Show HN: Unskew My Search, a web extension for peaking into the Google black box - Unskew
https://www.unskewmysearch.com/
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Unskew
Unskew My Search is an experimental browser extension that seeks to help you
discover how your personal search results are being skewed by Google
recommendation algorithms.

Problem: Google notoriously collects and leverages an immense amount of user
data to better improve ad targeting, click through rates, and ultimately their
bottom line. These algorithms are largely a black box, meaning we as users
don’t have insight into how our personal data is being leveraged within them.
Unskew is an attempt to identify how our search results are being impacted by
unique data associated with our accounts.

How it works: When a Google search is run with the extension installed, Unskew
takes the search term and sends it to our servers. From there, we use a
network of proxies to run the same search from a user agent with no connection
to you or your account. We scrape these unaffiliated results and return them
to your browser where the extension compares them to the results you yourself
received.

Hypothesis: By controlling for the variable of user identifying information
and removing it from the equation, disparities in search results represent
attempts by the recommendation algorithm to personally tailor results.
Identifying the extent to which this occurs is vitally important, given
Google’s near monopoly on the search space. Potential negative impacts could
involve users increasingly becoming encased in an echo chamber of their own
making in order to maximize click through rates, or could indicate the
willingness to engage in even wider scale manipulation of search results
across user accounts which are more difficult to detect.

Feedback: We hope to hear and engage with feedback regarding our methodology,
UX, and how this tech could be better leveraged to benefit users and the UX,
and answer any questions. Outside of our immediate peer network this is our
first attempt at gaining wider feedback.

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na-na
I tried it on firefox and chromium without another extension, it doesn't seem
to work and only shows the message meeasuring skewing...

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evanmaynard1
If it's mostly focused at news, why doesn't it work on google's news tab?

