My intuition is that Google is looking over my shoulder while I browse (whether through its G-products, third-party widgits, keeping track of a search history that uses ‘site:boards.straigthdope.com’ a lot, or magic). I’m guessing that they’re putting SDMB results near the top of my searches under the belief that it’s more relevant to me.
On the other hand, I also go to Reddit a fair amount and rarely see them listed in my results. Plus, the ‘public’ computers in the house (i.e. kitchen, den and parlour) run Firefox on an Ubuntu VM with ‘always use private browsing’ checked and with NoScript, AdBlock and Ghostery active.
As an example, I just put “where to put both in a sentence” into the search box. The first hit is **KarlGauss’ ** 2009 thread asking the same question. It does not show up on Bing or DDG, which really proves nothing.
So, am I right that this is Google building a nice, comfy echochamber-like bubble around me, or do their algorithms (or humans) somehow account for GQ’s factual focus?
I am fairly sure that this is because Google PageRank algorithm ranks the SDMB quite highly. I never stay signed in to Google, but I also get the SDMB returned on searches when appropriate. What is more, the is very frequently spidered, so a post shows up in Google results very soon after it was made. This is all just a matter of Google working as it should.
This is not to sy that that Google isn’t tracking your history and creating a "search bubble around you. It surely is, and even, to some extent, around people who don’t sign in,* such as me, and even those who follow engineer_comp_geek’s suggestion. Google has long grown out of its phase of not being evil. However, I do not think that the behavior you note is a result of this tracking. That is just Google doing well what it does well.
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*If I go to the Maps page, for instance, it shows my local area without my having told it where I am.
I’ve wondered the same thing. Every time we have a thread and someone says “I just googled it and the top three hits are SDMB threads!!!” my first thought is that it’s because that person spends all day on the SDMB so google weights those results higher. I’ve always wanted to suggest to people that say that that they do the exact same search on a different computer, that they’ve never used and see if they get the same results.
You kind of answered my question since I don’t ever get reddit back in my search results and I go to reddit about three times a year, usually because someone provided a link to a discussion.