Philosophers have racked their brains for ages over the concept of objectivity. Do we all share the same reality? Does a particular type of green look the same way for me as it does for everyone else? Who knows.
Recently a friend and I figured out that this problem seems to extend itself to Google searches:

On the left you see Niko’s results for a search on “java”, on the right you see mine.
Both of us disabled the personalized search. Yet there are differences, indicated by the red arrows.
Now I surely think that internet personalization is a great thing. But there is another value Google seems to ignore more and more: Transparency. They have good reasons for not to reveal the exact algorithms they use to infer the quality of pages, yet I think that as a user I should be the one in charge to decide whether I want personalization or not.

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