How to turn off personalized search results in Google
Posted on October 7, 2007 at 11:53 am
I never knew this until a few days ago, but apparently the results you get back from a Google search are personalized results based on your previous searches and the sites you have visited in the past. I find this to be both good and bad because as a blogger and web site owner, I would like to be able to get the unbiased results to determine my current ranking in the search result pages as seen by others, but it’s also nice to get results from site that I already like.
Either way, for me I find it useful to turn off the personalized search results sometimes if I want to check a ranking or something specific, otherwise I’ll just leave it on.
Here’s a quick example of how your results are personalized over time when searching on Google: I searched the term SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, using my normal personalized search and got the following results:
As you can see, the first two results are from SEOCHAT.COM, which is a site that I visit sometimes and you can see on the second entry that it has 2 visits – Aug 3. Then comes Wikipedia.com, followed by SEOBook.com, and then SEO-NY and Google.com.
Now take a look at the de-personalized search results for the same term:
Now can you see the difference? The first result that most people would see if they performed this search is from Wikipedia, then SEOCHAT, followed by SEO-NY, Google.com, and SEOBook.
Of course this is not a major issue for most people and I don’t mind it that much, but it’s still something to consider before you automatically click on the first result as it may not necessarily be the BEST result, it’s just the result you’re most likely to want based on previous behaviors (that’s, of course, up for debate!).
How to turn off Personalized Search Results
There is really no permanent way to stop Google from personalizing your search results other than never being logged in when you perform a search! However, if you’re using GMail, Google Calendar, Picasa, etc, you’re more than likely already going to be logged in. So in that case, there are two methods:
1. Add &pws=0 to the end of the URL after you perform the search. So once you perform the search, you’ll have some long URL text in the address bar and you simply need to append the above bold text to the URL. Here’s how mine looks after adding the text. Press Enter and you’ll now get the depersonalized results.
2. The second method is to use the depersonalizer search engine!
Overall, not a big deal for most people, but if you’re checking your ranking for keywords in the SERP’s, you should make sure it’s not personalized results! Enjoy!
[tags]google personalized search, depersonalizer, turn off personalized search[/tags]
» Filed Under Computer Tips
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You can turn off personalized search simply by logging into your Google Web Search History and disabling it.
The link to your web search history is in the top right hand corner next to your Gmail address.
Once you disable the search history, Google can’t return personalized results because it has nothing to go on if you have disabled the indexing of your web searches.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the tip, I was not aware of this! Appreciate it!
Aseem
looks like you click on “pause” nowadays.
to disable any search engine search history first Go to “Internet Option => Contants => Auto Complete =>Forms” uncheck it and than ok it. than close your web browser and start new. now no history will be save in your search engine. enjoy.
ihsan, that’s for Browser search bar history, that has nothing to do with “Search Engine” history, as that is data which is stored in the search engine’s database.
Today I ran into the issue and I was pissed because I dont understand why google is messing with my searches. If people would like to use a personalized search then must login to their google account seems a reasonable thing, but without logging into it doesnt make sense.
That’s a great tip. Thanks to Mark also for his contribution.
Thanks for the heads up. I wasn’t aware of this. Something to definitely look into.
-Tom
Go to Google Account and Settings, Click on Edit by the My Products, then click on remove Web History.
Even more horrible, now Google tracks which search results we clicked by using javascript in the link listed in its search results.
It is also annoying when you want to copy the link, what copied is the javascript link.