Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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 accessing Google is now being personalized, signed in or not, so any desktop, laptop or kiosk will start tracking everything everyone does and you won't be able to access the same search results from any two machines.
The possible impact to all is staggering.
Case 1. This man owns one website, and uses Google once a day to check the rankings of his four most important keywords. But he always merely looks at the results and never clicks on anything. (He uses Bing for his personal searches.) Question: How, if at all, will his Personalized Google Results differ from Google's "regular" non-personalized results?
Case 2: This woman uses Google for all her searches, but never clicks on a video result. Question: Will her behavior cause videos to gradually disappear from her personalized results?
Any opinions on either case?
Case 2: This woman uses Google for all her searches, but never clicks on a video result. Question: Will her behavior cause videos to gradually disappear from her personalized results?
Sounds like me in that I've never clicked on a video result nor will I ever. I keep wishing they'd disappear but so far they haven't.
I see personalized results when I'm NOT signed in and regular results when I AM signed in
Google has made things quite complex in this area, and much of their online Help pages are now out of date, as Sid pointed out above. Do you have the Toolbar installed, with PR showing? If so that may also be part of the problem. I think the toolbar is a good habit to break.
When you're logged in, Google calls the data they collect "Web History". When you're logged out, your personalization is linked to a cookie. Google calls that "Search History". The previous terminology they used for getting clean results when logged out was "disable customizations" - but I can't find that resource any more.
But whatever the case for you, a three page difference is huge. You might be better off to stay logged in with Web History disabled until you get it all sorted. At least you know how to keep that personalization turned off!
What I do is use a dedicated browser just for Google Searches (and Bing, etc too). I treat it like a dedicated search application. It has no toolbars at all, and I dump cookies after each session. So far, it's working out.
But you're right on when you say "I NEED A PERMANENT SOLUTION". The whole world needs simplicity on this issue, whether they want to get personalized results or not. And so far, Google has not done the job well at all. There's not enough time in the day to spend a bunch of it playing with Google settings.
Use the cookie-less browser to check your untainted results.
It might be a good idea for us to all cooperate with comparative results over time. I don't mean specific results but just what differences you are seeing for (un-named) results in topic areas that you search for often in a personalised and an unpersonalised browser.
Cheers
Sid
Kiddies... you've subscribed to the koolaid. There's little you can do to find the truth since the google-aide is all you can see.
Bing it or Yahoo, ie. quit sipping the google-aide, to find out where you really rank. And none of us, on any platform, are going to be really happy. Just the way the world web searching facemybooktwit is going these days. But do remember: we are the content creators. And perhaps that might be the road to Tomorrow.
Sticking our heads in the sand is not the answer. The answer is to try and understand how this works in practice and use that knowledge to improve our results.
Traditional SEO on page and in link building coupled with good site structure and excellent content is going to continue to be vital to getting a high natural rank. If you don't get a high natural rank how can you benefit from personalisation other than by plain luck?
Cheers
Sid
As far as "from what I've read the #1-3 rankings do not change regardless of user/CPU or browser" - not true. And this is not news for me, this has been going on for months already. One of my clients comes up #1 for their main search term when they are logged in to Google and #2 when they are logged out. I always have to make sure they are logged out of their account before they check their rank in Google. I know it's been in effect since October, maybe even earlier.
This is about money - selling people's data, period. As far as privacy on the Internet is concerned, it doesn't exist. That ship sailed long ago.
