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Welcome to Eszter's Weblog Here you will find my thoughts and comments about all sorts of things from sociology, the Internet, academia, teaching, research, books and movies to current events, fun Web stuff, art, gadgets and just about anything else that comes to mind. If the inspiration strikes you during your visit, feel free to leave a note via the comments link.

[Previous entry: "The public life of a dissertation"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Finding playmates"] "Selective intelligence" 04/01/2004 Entry [This post appeared on Crooked Timber on March 28, 2004. See follow-up comments there.] There are clearly some very smart folks behind Google given that they provide us with a great service and continually add useful features. That said, at times I am surprised by some of the decisions. Should they be placing their machine intelligence over user preferences? I am surfing the Web in Budapest. When I try to go to google.com, I am redirected to google.co.hu. I change the URL because I prefer to see the site in English. Fine. Then I run a search using English words and get Adwords Sponsored Links on the right in Hungarian. The rest of the interface is in English as are all of the results, but the ads are not. (Granted, the one term that matched the search term “domain” was in the ads, but every other word was in Hungarian.) Geography does not equal language preference or knowledge, especially when the user has already signaled so. It seems getting meaningful ads would be in the interest of both Google and its Adwords clients, why this decision then? (I commented on something very similar a year ago and although it seems some progress may have been made, need for improvement remains.) April 2004 S M T W T F S         1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30   Links of Interest How to win the Nobel Prize Click for Mammogram Play "Match That Blogger" Blogathon 03 Archives Recent entries » Digital divide symposium » Some light shed on crazy 9/11 rumors » Our gendered world » All comments closed » Extending Internet access to low-income communities » Shattered » The story behind red alert » Weekend trivia » Would you cut up a book? » Pizza, cholesterol check, the works » Welcome » A different kind of road trip » Allowing comments on blogs » Paddling for bandwidth » The right to a soda.. at any price Previous entries May, 2002 - July, 2003 Blogger info Eszter Hargittai Communication Studies Department Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois 60208 blog at eszter dot com Blogs I Visit The small print A few words on what I will and will not post on this blog (taken from my E-LIST entry of January 2, 2002). I have nothing against posting commercial sites as long as they come highly recommended. In fact, I'm quite interested in improving informed consumer choice so I'm very curious to hear about good experiences with online retailers. What I will refrain from posting are sites that require plug-ins or programs that are painful to deal with. Example: I will not post anything that only works with RealOne/RealPlayer as that program is intrusive and annoying beyond belief and I am not willing to reinstall it on my machine (it was hard enough to get rid of it completely in the first place) nor do I want to encourage others to have it. If your site has audio content, please make it available in multiple formats or choose one that can be run on multiple players (e.g. .avi). Feel free to link to my Weblog with or without this graphic button. http://www.esztersblog.com

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