How to do I know what filters form the top results if they aren't transparent? What would lead you to believe that familiarizing yourself with a different point of view would take you down a meaningfully different path through the search graph? None that I can see. Every search has a non-objective filter. The original page rank is one such. What would be useful is to make the tree obvious and manipulable as a separate object itself.
I agree that it would be cool to expose the different criteria that Google (for instance) is using to help reorder your results, to the degree that those criteria can be discretely identified, but I'm not surprised that they don't; that's a pretty significant portion of their secret sauce they would be publicizing.
I also don't think that mere transparency would really help solve any search engine "filter bubble" problem, if such a thing is real. Nothing would make Joe Google User take five minutes off whatever he came to search for to fiddle with some tree full of sliders on his result page.
Agreed. I wouldn't either 80% of the time. But often I'm making a very directed search that I would really like the "best" results for where best is usually defined as different than the results I'm getting.
Hey, check this out, Google already sort of does it. I didn't know that (probably because I have "web history" turned off, so I don't get customizations.)
