"""
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination.
"""
What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links? That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself.
And back to the vacation thingie, no, I don't want "to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations". If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented "vacation experience" that said friends would sit in awe when I'll post my photos online, and you can surely bet I'll not just be a copy-cat. This is how "post vacation photos to FB" works, but this coming from Google with their idealistic and deterministic view on how the world goes it doesn't really surprise me.
> What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links?
That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself.
If you are worried about a stalker, not befriending him/her on Google+ and keeping your personal content private are the obvious solutions. I am almost sure that you were being sarcastic, but just in case you were pointing out that this increases the ease of stalkers - well so does nearly every other communication and content publishing (and retrieval) technology ever created. Phones, forums, blogs, smarter search engines, social networks and faster/cheaper internet connections - everything made a stalker's life easy. Knives make it incredibly easy for bad people to hurt others but we do not condemn the man who invented the knife or the company that produces them for it.
> ...If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented...
I, on the other hand, would love to know a place that my friends (whose interest are much similar to me than a general average of the world) loved. It also means that the place would probably be closer to home, or more accessible than the general global destination that the world is talking about. Going to the same holiday destination as a friend doesn't make you less of a individual as you are suggesting. And still if you believe that you want your destination to be unique, then 1998 Altavista would be a better search engine - because whatever popularity metric you choose to rank result, if it is any good it will end up showing a frequently visited and appreciated destination above unique and rarely visited others.
And even if you are correct and I am simply and utterly wrong about this, they do provide a not-personalized search that will give you the vanilla ranking results. I do not thing that they will serve the purpose but they will take you to the DDG like suggestions if you like them. I am surprised that many are not appreciating the changes here, especially after knowing the fact that many had the same concerns that they want Google to give access to not-personalized results!
What if I want to search for "beach-side photos" of my friends of the opposite sex, or of my friends' friends? Can Google accurately show relevant results, without me, a poor stalker, having to soullessly click on countless links? That's a billion-dollar industry all in itself.
And back to the vacation thingie, no, I don't want "to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations". If anything, I want to have such an unique and unprecented "vacation experience" that said friends would sit in awe when I'll post my photos online, and you can surely bet I'll not just be a copy-cat. This is how "post vacation photos to FB" works, but this coming from Google with their idealistic and deterministic view on how the world goes it doesn't really surprise me.