The web personalization, is a process that makes the results of a search on the web adapted to a specific user, by filtering the contents according to the parameters that are based on the algorithms. These are necessary to make the search engine works and they use data left by the consumer on the web, that are also used to create profiles to differentiate users.
Even if most of the users are aware of the virtues of the search engines, as they improve their experience and as many people now depend on them to get information, the web personalization has generated a series of ethical concerns related to objectivity and bias in the context of search engines, related to lack of transparency, as the companies of the search engines do not always reveal their practices regarding the collection of information about users and how they treat them once collected. Moreover another aspect of the debate was born by the consideration that results generated “ad hoc” for a user limits the serendipity and the diversity of a research, not allowing the person that is searching to expand his knowledge.
This research has the aim to explore the debate generated by the controversy of web personalization and to answer the research question “More personalization is equal to more knowledge?”. It is divided in four section and for each one of these are presented an explanation of how the research was conducted, that is called protocol, and the results of the research, represented by a main visualization.
The research started approaching to the debate using as a source Wikipedia, so to understand the fields in which the discussion was taking place and to find the research question. The second chapter has the aim to find the debate sides and to show how the features of the different positions. The last two chapter extended the research on the debate to two fields that are relevant for the research question: the academic side and the journalistic one.