By Chris Baraniuk — BBC Future
The internet is one big experiment, and you’re part of it. Every day, millions of trials are manipulating what you see when you browse online, to find out how to keep your attention, make you click more links – and spend more money. And these experiments are often secret. You’ll probably never know you were part of them.
This is all thanks to something now well-known in the tech industry, called A/B testing. It means that the web pages served to you are not necessarily the same as those shown to the next person – they might have slightly different colours, an alternate headline or, on social networks, you could be shown different personal information about your friends and family.
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