SearchWiki, Groupthink and Privacy
Yesterday I posted about a few of the serious privacy flaws in Google’s SearchWiki. Thankfully, there seems to be a solution to the problem of name association. Dave Weinberger noticed “[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up.” To address this problem, Google will allow you to change your nickname.
Is my email address displayed to other users?
No. Other users who view your SearchWiki notes see only your Google Account nickname. (Note that you can see your email address in the top right of your screen when you’re signed in to your own Google Account.) You can edit your nickname by clicking My Account in the top right corner of the screen while you’re signed in.
I suppose that is a start. Of course, with a RDB backend, one wonders what happens when you change your nickname – is your nick changed everywhere? And if so, is Google really affording privacy by allowing you to change your nickname? That is, if your handle is changed on all of the previous content you’ve generated, you haven’t really achieved privacy, you’ve just made it a little harder for people to figure out who you are.
Google seems to be noticing the problem. As reported by Michael Zimmer and Jessamyn West in comments to my blog, Google seems to be rolling in fixes live to deal with some of these issues. Notably, a warning screen shows up before you start posting comments.
Perhaps more interesting than the privacy issues is SearchWiki’s failure in interaction design. Granted, the quality of Google’s products has declined in the past few years, but the particular failures of SearchWiki combined with its prominence and universal rollout are simply astounding. Beyond the no-opt-out, beyond the no-private-notes, beyond the lack of privacy, there are a number of just downright poor interaction choices. ReadWriteWeb notes:
There are two major problems with SearchWiki, beyond the fact that it’s not a wiki. First, the usability is awful. It’s really bad. Users have the visual UI of Google, famous for being clean and clear of disruptions, but if they want to view the markup from other users they have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the search results page. Then, in many cases, clicking that button just tells you there are no wiki results. It’s a terrible user experience.
Second, there’s no changing, challenging or hiding anything that’s been posted. Try a search for McDonald’s, for example. There are two notes – one from some random web designer that’s spamming the “wiki” with a link to his page, the other from some joker testing the obscenity filter. Neither can be removed, edited, nothing.
One of the most curious oversights is that Google only allows you to see the ten most recent comments, which is simply bewildering. Why collect comments if you’re only going to allow me to see an edited few?
As an organization, Google is famously nonhierarchical with a flat structure. In the modern organization, such a design will theoretically prevent many of the problems with power structures in groups, most notably the problem of groupthink. Without knowing the story behind SearchWiki, it would be irresponsible for anyone to diagnose groupthink. However, to have such a prominent corporation introduce such a fundamentally flawed product on top of their main product line – these type of spectacles are often the product of groupthink. To that extent, it wouldn’t be surprising if there was a very high-level champion of SearchWiki, who argued for the “data value” of the project (in a very quantitative and convincing fashion), while the interaction and interface designers were either muted or overruled.
I predict that SearchWiki’s days are numbered (perhaps in the single digits, as the Thanksgiving holiday would provide some cover for the rollback). Google should re-tool SearchWiki as an opt-in, fully-featured product that has smart privacy options. Without all of these, SearchWiki offers no value to the end user, and it becomes transparent that it is nothing more than a data-grab. Ideally, personalization should benefit the end-user and the company. As I’ve stated before, I’m not against personalization – in fact I like it. But Google has gone about this all wrong, and it is time to fix the problem.
Update: SearchEngineLand asked SearchWiki product manager Cedric DuPont if Google plans to allow people to opt out of SearchWiki.
“While users don’t have the option of turning off SearchWiki, they do have the option not to use the feature.”
Yes, and I suppose I also had the option to not drink the New Coke. Interesting side note – DuPont is a DARPA Grand Challenge winning artificial intelligence and robotics engineer turned MBA, (according to his personal Knol). In addition, DuPont was/is the product manager at Knol, another one of Google’s initiatives that worked much better on paper than in practice. Interesting to see how this fit into my predictions.
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