How to Turn Google’s Personalized Search Off…Without Having to Sign Off
Ever Google yourself? [Don't worry, we all do it.] Ever notice how your results might be vastly different from someone sitting right next to you?
There are a ton of factors that Google incorporates to make your search results the best they can be – and they all amount to a little thing called personalized search. Personalized search incorporates:
- Web history
- Personalized results
- Recent searches
- Universal search
- Geographic location (Local Results)
- Starred results
- Social search
- Real time search
Personalized Search affects everything you Google. Your results will look very different from the guy down the street, which will look very different from the guy across town. So how are you to know what other people see?
Not to worry…there’s a quick and easy way to see results as if you were anywhere or anyone.
After Googling, add &pws=0 to the end of the URL. For example, “http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=maine+seo&pws=0” And there you have it!
Nicki Hicks is a Search Engine Marketer at flyte new media, a Web design and Internet Marketing firm in Portland, Maine. Nicki blogs at the Maine SEO Blog, and you can find her on Twitter at@nickihicks
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17 Responses to “How to Turn Google’s Personalized Search Off…Without Having to Sign Off”
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I believe I heard some SEO saying that adding this parameter was no longer working to “clean up” personalized resultts. Did it ever stopped working? Is it really back?
Thanks, Nick.
Yeah, this hasn’t been working for a while. Still not for me.
Anyone, please clarify if it’s still working or not.
If not, can you suggest any other quick way to turn-off the personalized search?
From my reading of several sources, this parameter alone does not work. You cannot do Google searches with your Google account active since then you will get a Search History and personalized results. I believe the most likely way to avoid Personalized results requires two steps:
a ) Erase all the Google cookies on your computer, and
b ) Use the Firefox Global Search extension, which then avoids using your own Google account.
I would be interested to see other opinions on this.
Hi folks! =)
It’s a long shot, but I believe either Graywolf or Distilled’s Will Critchlow exposed that pws was not working anymore. I’m not sure. Maybe someone else at SEOmoz or Distilled teams.
Barry is rigth, if you clean up FF, then you get clean results, except for geotargeted results (maps).
Also, using Google’s Chrome browser in anonymous mode seems to work pretty fine too. But its Google’s anyway, so it’s better to take it with a grain of salt.
Thanks for the feedback, guys!
Thanks for the tip Barry I have been using http://yoast.com/tools/seo/disable-personalized-search-plugin/ but as you say the &pws=0 hasn’t worked for me for a while at least not for me.
Interesting post Nicki. There are certainly lots of factors which kick in on the search listings order as you have said. To begin with though, I always make sure that I’m logged out as the &pws=0 doesn’t seem to work for me.
Viewing 100% ‘natural’ Google search listing orders seems to be getting more difficult as they add more tricks behind the scenes… as Frank says, the geotargeted results always remain. I wonder whether someone will develop a platform which enables us to pretend to be in a specified location when performing a search? Or has somebody already done this?
Frank Marcel Reply:
April 21st, 2010 at 11:20 am
Hi Nicola, I’ve never heard of any plataform like the one you say, however, it is possible to try to “be” in a different place when you perform a search under IP addresses from different locations and setting them as proxies for your connection.
I’m not a specialist on this kind of IP-server-proxy-things, but we use something like that on some of our tools at MestreSEO.
Nicola Connolly Reply:
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:02 am
Thanks for the response Frank. Interesting technique. I imagine the technical guys in our SEO department will have used something similar but it sounds a little complicated for my designer mind!
As Frank said, this is not working for me. The best thing I can do it to clean my cookies, logout from my G account and then search. Sometimes I do use proxies, so I can see results not based on my location too.
Another tip that Frank said that we use a lot is use Chrome Anonymous.
Interesting. I have never heard about such a facility in google before. I generally don’t search a lot with my account signed in, because I hate spams in my mail due to the personalized search results.
Thanks for sharing.
Sometimes i find it that i am out of personal search and still i am doing the same…i have to figure it out
Thanks for the post. I just found out recently that the results were different if I was logged in. What a disappointment when I found out I was actually first for a search term. I make sure I am always signed out now but thanks for the tip.
Good blog but this is not working for me…………
All,
The trick seemed to be working before. Try logging out and using the =&pws=0 attribute. Any luck?
-Nicki
Good blog. Keep writing on this. Very-2 thanks for the good tips.
Nice one.. It helped me.. The comments are also very very informative.
One thing though. I have noticed that if you log into a diff browser(not used a lot) and then use the search there, that shows up the correct results (Localisation aside)