Tuesday, May 1, 2012

How to Avoid Personalized Google Search Results and Ads in Chrome


Personalized Google results are supposed to be useful. The idea is to deliver the most relevant content for you based on your past searches. The problem is that there are often scenarios where you don’t want personalized search results. If you are trying to do research then you may well find this personalization extremely annoying. Thankfully there is always a way to get round the problem.

Google personalizes your results using two methods. One uses your Web search history whenever you are logged in to any Google service. The other uses a cookie to store your search information.

If you are logged in to a Google account, on any page of Google results you should see a globe icon at the top right and you can hit that to Hide personal results. You simply hit the person icon to switch back but you’ll find it probably switches back automatically when you start a new session. If you want to make it permanent then hit the Gear at the top right and select Search settings then scroll down until you see Personal settings and choose Do not use personal results. That will now work for you when you are signed in to your Google account but when you sign out you may find your results are personalized again.

If you aren't signed in to a Google account then go to http://www.google.com/history/optout and select Disable customizations based on search activity.

There are other ways to avoid personalized results.

One of the simplest ways is to add &pws=0 to the URL of a search query. If you use Google Chrome then all you have to do is click on the “wrench” icon at the top right and select New Incognito Window. Chrome’s incognito mode will automatically add &pws=0 to your searches so you shouldn’t be getting personalized results.

This SEO blog face-off gives you an analysis of the results you might get with each method. It seems that turning off personalization in your Google account may be the best option to avoid personalized Google search results.

If you want to avoid personalized Google ads there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s an extension for Chrome users called Keep My Opt-Outs which prevents ad personalization via cookies. The bad news is for anyone not using Chrome because that’s the only browser it works for.

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