I’ve always thought of personalization as a good thing. If Google knows something about me then it can provide results that I’ll find more relevant, right?

Watch this TED talk by Eli Pariser and, like me, you might start having second thoughts.

Pariser is former executive director of MoveOn and is now a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His book The Filter Bubble is set for release May 12, 2011. In it, he asks how modern search tools — the filter by which many of see the wider world — are getting better and better and screening the wider world from us, by returning only the search results it “thinks” we want to see.

via On the dangers of personalization Federated Search Blog.