Google Personalized Search, death to search engine placement

I don’t normally write about changing issues with the search engines, however, a situation has surfaced that directly effects all website owners and their visitors.

On December 4th, 2009 Google announced “personalized search”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html


“Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide”

That's a staggering statement meaning that every computer now accessing Google is being personalized, if you’re signed in to Google or NOT. So any desktop, or laptop will start tracking everything everyone does and no two people will be able to access the same search results from any two machines.

The possible impact to all website owners is staggering.

This pretty much makes checking your placement in the search engine results almost meaningless!


This Google option is “Opt-Out” only, you are now automatically enrolled into personalized search anytime you use a Google property (Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc). If you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser, you cannot stop the personalized search function…. Without un-installing the toolbar…

Personalized search can influence what you see on Google’s results pages. As an example, in December you may have searched for a fishing rod for uncle Bob, You might still see fishing rod ads while searching with Google in February because you looked at them while logged in to personalized search.

There's something about always getting personalized search results that is troubling, too. I can see it creating a kind of ostrich phenomenon, where the average user is less and less exposed to anything new.

If you disable the personalized search results, It can still come back ON! Every time you visit a Google property it turns back on. You end up playing “whack-a-mole” turning it back off all the time….

Here’s instructions on how to disable personalized search (at least until you revisit a Google property)

If you aren't signed in to a Google Account, your search experience will be customized based on past search information linked to a cookie on your browser.

To disable history-based customizations, follow these steps:
In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.

Remember it turns itself back on automatically!!!!!


There may eventually come a time where you will be unable to figure out where you rank for specific key terms.

I’ve been watching the situation over the last 60 days, this issue and the release of Google’s new Caffeine search algorithm released on Jan 1st and the NEW partnership with the NSA have made the current search results listings a wildly changing place. There’s several issues with Google that are beginning to make Google appear a lot like “Big Brother” (I.E. George Orwell – 1984).


“You will be assimilated”
(the Borg – Star Trek)

“Today we’re helping people”
(the Gorg – Google, Inc)