Google News Becoming Google News Plus?

Yesterday on the Google News blog, product manager Scott Zuccarino announced a new feature for those who keep up with their news through Google: Realtime Coverage pages that include results from Google+. Right now, this option is only available for people who have signed up for Google+ and are checking out the U.S. edition of Google News, but here's a sample screenshot of what a Realtime Coverage page looks like.

Of course, if you hate this feature you can modify your Google News settings to turn it off or simply sign out of Google altogether, but it does look like the search giant is continually looking for more ways to push the Google+ platform. (That's not really a shocker, though, is it?)

If your brand has a Google+ presence, will this new feature help improve your overall Google Search visibility? In a recent experiment conducted by Tasty Placement, the web design and SEO company found that even having a Google+ brand page with a fairly modest number of followers substantially improved Google ranking for a website. While this was an isolated experiment and the results shouldn't be considered scientific, the findings are still very interesting and well worth noting.

What are your thoughts? If you don't have a Google+ brand page yet, are you holding back due to lack of time or some other reason? Has this latest integration with Google News pushed you to rethink your position on G+?

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.