In my opinion the bigger problem is, when people are not aware that they're in a bubble. They existed, even before social media and internet searches. E.G. when I was a kid/teen, I got most of the information about the world from one local news paper and one evening news show on tv. Yes, their "newsfeed" wasn't generated by algorithms. But still, it's someone that decided for me what is relevant and what not. Nowadays I have access to much more sources and different point of views as long as I am aware that they exist and know it's up to me looking them up. Similar thing if your part of a strongly opinionated subculture. It is hard to even realize how limited your horizon might be.
So I try to embrace the bubble when it is useful for me. I appreciate that when I type "something something python" into google the top results are relavant to my work and not about snakes or comedians. But when I'm want to form a politcal opinion I use duckduckgo and activly look for contrary positions.
> So I try to embrace the bubble when it is useful for me. I appreciate that when I type "something something python" into google the top results are relavant to my work and not about snakes or comedians. But when I'm want to form a politcal opinion I use duckduckgo and activly look for contrary positions.
I have a hard time feeling like it's helping me when I get filter bubbled; I feel like I'm more productive and on point when I know where I am in relation to the rest of the world for whatever reason. The feeling when you learn what to search to get the desired specialized results instead of other general usages by adding keywords or going to sites that are more specialized themselves (e.g. stackoverflow where you can search [r] to search posts tagged with "r" in particular) is wonderful. You opt in to a bubble of a particular sort versus not knowing what else there is out there. I tend to feel a bit... disgusted with Google deciding what's good for me during a given search.
Common man is brought up within the bubble of their parent's beliefs. Intelligent man breaks out of that bubble, once he find it too constraining. Unintelligent man does not. Unintelligent man also have trouble identifying bubbles.
Earth provide opportunities for success for both men. In the long run, one of them will dominate the other.
This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's not something that bothers me terribly by itself, it may not be important yet, I just don't like the precedent and idea of it.
And Facebook just can't seem to remember that I never am interested in whatever it considers "top stories", but always, every time I log on, switch it to "most recent". Not that I know that I actually get all the most recent stuff, but on top of that Facebook is clearly telling me it would prefer me to see its own curation of it, even though I obviously have no interest in that. That this option doesn't stick seems like the intended behaviour, and I consider that yet another hostile aspect of it. So I'll assume whatever they're now doing instead of a UI that deserves the title, it will understand text just fine when it suits advertisers, and will be useless otherwise. Not a claim, but a guess.
I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
Except you're diminishing the importance of search results ordering. Some research has shown that ~50% of clicks go to the top two search results and ~90% of clicks go to the top ten search results.
Filter bubble might be addressable using ideas related to "information quotient": If FB decides it's worth trying to "show you the content that will most effectively challenge your views", then we pop the filter bubble, promote good content, etc etc.
Note - I don't just mean, "content that disagrees with you", because 95% of that is shit (Sturgeon's Law), but, content that effectively disagrees with you. That actually has a chance of changing your mind.
Information Quotient, as I understand it, is the idea of "What information will teach me the most?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
(even mentions Facebook's news-stream)