Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 4)
Google is tracking what you search for and look at whether you are signed into your Google account or not (done through browser history) and will customize results according to what you seem to prefer.
If you use the account version you can look at your history and remove and adjust. With the browser version you have no access.
Danny Sullivan describes the clues that you can pick up from Google on what kind of tracking and customizing it is doing for you. Watch for Web History, and for View Customizations. There is an opt-out page for personalized results.
Ultimately this means that no two searchers will get the same results for the same query.
"“We want diversity of results,” said product manager Johanna Wright. “This is something we talk about a lot internally and believe in. We want there to be variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. We want them in personalized search to be skewed to the user, but we don’t want that to mean the rest of the web is unavailable to them.”"
In Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention, Sullivan wrote,
"The days of “normal” search results that everyone sees are now over. Personalized results are the “new normal,” and the change is going to shift the search world and society in general in unpredictable ways."
Posted by Gwen at December 8, 2009 12:27 AM