wolffyluna

I've been messing with Google's head recently. Not intentionally, but it sure is happening. In one case, I know exactly what I'm doing to mess with it, but the other one is making me side-eye google a bit.

1. I am not a programmer. I am... non-zero technical, and I do think programming is interesting, but my l33t haxxor skills start and end at using R to read.csv and struggling through the manual to find the average of something. I am not the target audience of presentations about white-to-"grey" hat hacking, is what I'm saying. But youtube sure thinks I do! It also thinks I want to watch 3 hour javascript tutorials.

But it is kinda my fault that youtube thinks that. I find it easier to fall asleep if there's some sort of background noise. Preferably human voices talking calmly about something technical. Bonus points if that technical thing is interesting that I don't know jackshit about.

So I've been mainlining Computerphile videos in my sleep. And because I've set things to autoplay, and I'm asleep and thus can redirect things if the algorithm goes astray-- three hour javascript tutorials and hacking. I predict I'll be getting ads for pentest services soon.

2. Google never seemed to notice I was a chemistry student. Like, it might suggest some chemistry related news articles (I use firefox and desktop, but chrome on mobile because of space constraints.) But now I'm mostly looking at Earth science and space stuff, it's eaten my recommended news.

Now, it's possible that the filling up the news recs might just be because there's more space or geology based news in a given week than chemistry based news, but I think that it might... associate me with Earth science more strongly? And the best explanation for that is that I am looking at more Earth science related pages than I looked at chemistry related pages, because I have so many research essays.

But why does google know I'm searching for Earth science papers? Like, there were a couple times that I found a useful reference in a paper I was reading, and clicked the 'go via Google Scholar' link in the bibliography. And if google knows about the fact I look up papers about the Curiosity rover because I looked at Google Scholar, I don't mind that. I gave that information to google, willingly.

But I'm--possibly paranoidly-- worried that google might be somehow seeing my traffic through my university library's search system (which is how I'm getting to most of the papers) even when I'm on firefox.

(I'm also not sure if I should feel insulted that google thinks I want to read the Global Times and the Daily Express.)