Personalised Results

Forced personalised results when not logged in

[glitterball]

Over the last few days I have started to receive a weird set of results on my main PC from Google.com.
I am not logged in and I receive the same set of results in all browsers. I have tried deleting cookies, but this has no effect. It doesn't seem to be related to my IP address either as I have changed this and other PCs on the same network still get the normal Google results.

If I use the IP address to access the same Google data center, I receive a normal set of results. The same applies if I specify a region (e.g. gl=US).

Is anyone else seeing this?
Does anyone know how Google is tracking me (if not by cookies or IP)?
How do I get back to the normal results?

[tedster]

The first thing that came to my mind was wondering if you're still logged into some other Google product. But since you're seeing this on different browsers, that theory doesn't really hold water, it would only explain same-browser effects.

Danny Sullivan had an informative post last February about some ins-and-outs of the personalized search that Google added back then: [searchengineland.com...] - maybe you can pick up a clue there.

Matt Cutts dropped a tidbit at the SMX conference that might help anlayze your situation. Adding &pws=0 to the end of the url for your results page is supposed to turn off personalized results even when you're logged in. If it doesn't do that for you, I'd begin to wonder about some kind of malware on your computer.

[glitterball]

I found the answer:

The reason that I was receiving these weird results from all browsers on one machine was because I was using OpenDNS (or at least that was how Google was identifying me).

I switched back to my ISP's DNS and not only did my results change, but also my localisation and language settings were reset as well.