Google are facing a giant backlash about this with their personalized search results. Google can provide universally-relevant results to all of us easily, but they were (rightly?) afraid of being out-competed in the "niche-of-1" market. For now, their personalized results are stuck in the uncanny valley, just like advertisements are.
[Also not the OP]
One of the ways you can see this in action is with re-targeting. If you visit somewhere like SEOMOZ or www.shoesofprey.com (with cookies enabled) you will start seeing advertisements for them pop up everywhere. It feels strange (especially since I am a long way from teh target market for something like Shoes of Prey -- checking them out as an interesting Australian startup does not mean that I want to buy a custom-built pair of high heels)
I'm not entirely sure what you meant to say in that last sentence, but I know you didn't mean to say "uncanny valley". Stuck in limbo, perhaps? (whatever that would mean)
Maybe "creepy" - I search for an item, and Google shows me ads for that item for the next month; I keep searching for that item, and Google learns to tailor its results to what I want.
Some people find this useful. Other people find it creepy.
I find the creepiest search ads are ones that direct me right back to the context of a site I was already surfing on a few minutes earlier. E.g. I was looking at the Amazon Sci Fi book section for example. Then, via google adsense on some other blog page I'll now see an adsense ad for Sci Fi books on Amazon. This has happened to me a couple of times now.
I'd hesitate to call Google search entertainment or community-building (social) though. Those are the two characteristics where universal appeal is difficult that I meant to highlight.
Google is really good at universal systems that produce quantitatively better results when the user input is minimal and the output is easily optimized.
You could argue my restaurant example is an input-output problem. Good ingredients in. Solid, repeatable kitchen process. Good food out. Unfortunately, food preparation is a manual process involving high levels of individual skill and has an inherently large variance. That's why running a restaurant is a people problem. The tricky output is the ambiance. Food is important but restaurants are also social entertainment. Combine those two and that's why niche restaurants are almost always better than chains (imo of course.)
Sure they do. Think about all the other search engines people use. With only a few exceptions (Bing, DuckDuckGo), they are niche. If I want to look up a restaurant, I might use Yelp but I'll use a different search engine for a different niche. It's the same pattern, just in a different form.
