mhansen - 2:57 pm on Apr 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Just an observation, but I feel something significant is going on with personalized search results, that's causing serp's to show real-crap when you aren't logged into Google.

I noticed over the weekend that results were really starting to look personalized on my Firefox browser, that's set to block a myriad of Google related domain cookies. Up until now, the results were never really personalized except for location, which is hard to change or set without a cookie.

Today, I continued to notice several places I regularly visit in places they shouldn't be... like "99% unrelated" queries still showing in the top 5. (Ex: a "designer blue widgets" site popping into top serps for "cool blue water", etc)

After hitting the "verbatim" result tab a few times, I am convinced that Goog is ignoring my settings and still personalizing the results.

When I use FF in the incognito mode, the results are absolutely garbage for me. Full of answer sites, sourceforge results for single string queries that aren't really related, etc.

I blindly predict we are going to see an announcement soon, that if your search results are poor, you need to login to Google (and get your free G+ account) and allow them to personalize your search, which will guarantee better results.

If that's not the case... Google is seriously broken right now.