Google Search Now More Personalized - December 4th, 2009
Google’s been tailoring search results for quite some time now, and their new Web History, a considerable upgrade to the venerable Search History, has made far deeper personalization a reality. Now they’ve taken it one step further — Google’s enabled personalized search for users who aren’t signed in to Google.
Personalization without Google sign-in is enabled via anonymous cookie, while active accounts benefit from a beefed up version of already extant personalized search results — results now bolstered by location, search terms, search history, and web history. This all makes search results potentially more relevant to users, but not everyone is comfortable with this. I am, but I think I may become slightly more of a minority with every new release/advance/acquisition that Google makes. Either way, for the tinfoil-hat wearing masses out there, it only takes a couple of minutes to disable the whole thing.
Easy to Disable:
Logged into Google or not, the new personalized search is easy to deactivate. For Google account-holders, it’s as simple as removing Web History from their Google accounts.
The cookie that enables personalized search for users not signed-in to Google runs a lifespan of 180 days unless either removed by the user, or disabled via preference — at Google — here’s how:
- In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
- On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.
Ironically, the preference to disable the cookie is in fact stored on the user’s computer as a cookie. Because of this, users should remember that clearing the affected browser’s cookies will reactivate the feature, which brings me to my last point.
Hate Google?
If, by chance, you despise Google and never meant to allow such a cookie on your system, completely removing it is as simple as clearing your browser’s cookies.