Editorial: Who does Google think you are?

Google became King of Internet Searches by being the best at organizing the web's chaos of "endless" information into tidy lists. Today, Google's gone from being a guide to being God.

Rather than taking our keywords and listing the results based on a universal relevance algorithm, the everything-web monarchy now filters the searches based on what it omnisciently knows about us.

Each user at each computer is "identified" by age, gender, geography and interests. Based on a record of all our Google searches and YouTube queries, we're shown not a list of actual results, but one of compatible results. It skips the step where we take each link out on a date and, instead, are told which ones could be our soulmate.

Wanna see the dating profile Google's built for your romantic webscapade?

Check it out here:

www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/.

While we agree with our columnist Brady Moore that Google isn't "evil," it's irresponsible for Google to only tell us what it thinks we want to hear.

The Internet was born as the new age champion of Free Expression and the right to make up our own minds without the filter of our parents, our government or our local TV producer. But rather than being a great tool used to seek new insights and connect with other web adventurers worldwide, it's become an echo chamber in which we isolate ourselves even more.

Somewhere in all those algorithms to make life easier, we lost opportunities to grow.

We're students at a liberal arts university founded on the idea that knowing a little about everything might not give us higher wages, but it sure makes us better human beings. We're forced to engage with the uncomfortable, the down-right difficult (philosophy, anyone?) and respectfully debate our world views.

Few of us graduate as the same person who applied to college because these challenges teach us to think critically and recognize the value of different opinions — even if they're ultimately wrong.

We hope you'll opt-out of the profile Google's built for you and that you'll join us in preserving the unblazed trails of the Wild Wild Web.