Search queries have different purposes. Personalization based on my preferences and past search works wonders for known-item seeking and for re-finding.
But for exploratory search and exhaustive search personalization works as an echo chamber (or filter bubble if you will) .
Then there is the problem of change and inertia. People change, their preferences vary in time. Personalization has an inertia that causes the recommendation engine to always be behind the actual preferences. It's more visible the better the recommendation engine.
I'm not saying personalization is problematic. There are problems with using it all the time and stealthily, without a clear possibility to turn it off.
All can be remedied by tweaking the algorithms and that happens all the time, you can also use a certain vertical directly for certain type queries (scholar search etc).
The same way that what a user might enjoy can be inferred the inverse of that can be used as a signal in the algorithm as well. Personalization is just relevance and all is just a matter of tuning.
I agree, it can be remedied by better algorithms - such that can recognize when I'm doing a search for a known item and when I'm performing exploratory search. In the first case, personalize away, in the second case, please show me everything.
The challenge is that people switch very quickly between these search modes and don't even think about it.
But for exploratory search and exhaustive search personalization works as an echo chamber (or filter bubble if you will) .
Then there is the problem of change and inertia. People change, their preferences vary in time. Personalization has an inertia that causes the recommendation engine to always be behind the actual preferences. It's more visible the better the recommendation engine.
I'm not saying personalization is problematic. There are problems with using it all the time and stealthily, without a clear possibility to turn it off.
It's not FUD, but a challenge to overcome.