Since a previous post of mine, Google has been advertising a M.Sc. in marketing to me. I am absolutely and utterly not interested in that. Yet another manifestation of the irrelevance of what algorithms come up with. Now that I’ve clearly stated it, will I stop seeing those ads? Or will it only focus on the keywords and go on advertizing that some more?

For what it’s worth: unfortunately even humans react to words in a way that makes abstraction of the meaning of the sentence they were used in. That may be a visceral reaction.

I remember a study using word count and relating it to various aspects of the writer from a statistical point of view. Then in order to be categorized more accurately, you need to know, if that information is made available to you, which criteria are used to identify which characteristics, and ensure through great self-monitoring efforts that you remain within average statistics for your actual characteristics, moving your data from the long tail toward the center of the bell curve. Being there would make life easier, but moving there will take a lot of effort on a regular basis and may make you lose any USPs you had in what you’re aiming at achieving in life.

That said, if I tell someone I am absolutely not interested in X, they sometimes understand. Sometimes. Whereas if I say this to a crawler, unless it processes semantics while being designed to only react after a number of occurrences, it will just never understand.

How about an opt-in instead of all that? We decide what we’re interested in and inform you, Google. Then you inform us about those things only.

That would be so much easier for everybody. Less R&D expenses for you, albeit marginally. Less processing power needed. Great.

But it is obviously assumed that we don’t know what we want. Which may be true for many. But not for everybody. Therefore, how about asking us if we prefer the above opt-in setting?

Equally notably, when we proactively search for a keyword, please don’t as a priority come up with things we are familiar with - for instance what people we are connected to said about it. Because we can ask them directly. We know them, right? Or will you argue that we don’t really know the people we know. I must agree, but obviously you don’t really know us either.

You may argue that we may think that we know what we want although we really don’t know what we want and you know what we want better than we do. That would be our problem then, wouldn’t it? Not yours.

Or is it that you really don’t care about what we want and just want to maximize your monetisation and potential thereof? Common practice. Would be fair enough if you were in another position, I suppose. But here, I protest in the following manner:

Please don’t regurgitate our familiar contexts or environments or what you think these should be. The world is small enough already. You are limiting our entitlement to explore.

So. How about an opt-in?