Google knows your need before you ask

Along with questions about fairness to
advertisers and competitors, Google's current approach to web searching raises
another issue: the tailoring of information for consumers. You and I can type
the same keywords into Google and get vastly different results. This
personalization is ostensibly a service to us.

But are machines able to determine what is relevant
information for us and what is not? Is it possible to embed algorithms with a
sense of civic responsibility or journalistic ethics?

The Internet is often described as a radically democratic
mechanism that strengthens our communicative sinews. But this notion of the web
as a tool of interconnectivity is becoming mythology. "Going online" means
entering not a global conversation so much as an informational space created by
algorithms that pick up dozens (Eli Pariser argues 57)
of personality indicators in order to deliver the search results that you want
to see.