8 ms·

If I had to tackle the notion of over-personalization in ~5 minutes, I'd say: - If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the

If I had to tackle the notion of over-personalization in ~5 minutes, I'd say: - If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") to the end of the Google search url to turn it off, or use the incognito version of Chrome. Personalization tends to be a nice relevance improvement overall, but it doesn't trigger that much--when it launched, the impact was on the order of one search result above the fold for one in five search results. - personalization has much less impact than localization, which takes things like your IP address into account when determining the best search results. You can change localization by going to country-specific versions of Google (e.g. search for [bank] on google.co.uk vs. google.co.nz), or on google.com you can click "change location" on the left sidebar to enter a different city or zip code in the U.S. - We do have algorithms in place designed specifically to promote variety in the results page. For example, you can imagine limiting the number of results returned from one single site to allow other results to show up instead. That helps with the diversity of the search results. When trying to find the best search results, we look at relevance, diversity, personalization, localization, as well as serendipity and try to find the best balance we can. I saw Eli Pariser's talk at TED and was skeptical, although I did enjoy his example of Facebook starting to return only his liberal friends because he only ever clicked on the links his liberal friends shared. I had a number of concerns browsing through Pariser's book, but I would encourage anyone interested in these issues to pick up a copy; it's a thoughtful read.

pasbesoin 15y ago
Do you have a pointer to a publicly visible reference to the definition of some of the other query string parameters Google uses? Just thought I'd ask, given the context. I've noted various references people have cobbled together, but perhaps there's something a bit more... "canonical". Thanks for the above.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/610/xml_reference.html http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/61... is a reference for our search appliance, but a lot of parameters are in common. I'm not aware of any other official Google doc available externally, but if you search for [google search url parameters] the top 3-4 results are all quite good.
mtogo 15y ago
A much better alternative is https://ssl.scroogle.org https://ssl.scroogle.org , which doesn't have personalization since google can't tell scroogle users apart. It also has benefits like having a bit of privacy while you search.
- udoprog 15y ago
  Which in turn, incidentally leads back to DDG : ). Crazy good stuff has been going on with DDG the latest couple of months, I'm just glad I've finally found a search provider who takes these issues seriously!
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  I think Scroogle hits Google from a relatively small set of IP addresses. Be aware that Google is probably trying to localize for those IP addresses, so your results could be less relevant (in the same way that if you searched through a proxy in Germany, you'd be more likely to get results with a German emphasis). Personally, if I have a search that feels a bit sensitive, I just hop into incognito mode in Chrome. Control-shift-N is an easy shortcut to open an incognito window in Chrome. And don't forget that you can use https://encrypted.google.com/ https://encrypted.google.com/ to do a search via SSL as well, which provides an encrypted tunnel between your browser and Google.
  - mtogo 15y ago
    Your reccomendation is hilarious because it still does not give the user any privacy. Neither private browsing mode nor SSL will give the user any privacy from google, which is the real concern. You still log searches and IP addresses for an extremely long time. One solution that actually does solve this is to use Scroogle or to access google through Tor. EDIT: I feel that i should clarify that of course SSL is a very important feature to have for a whole slew of reasons and that i'm glad Google supports it, just that it wasn't relevant to my point.
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      "Your recommendation is hilarious because it still does not give the user any privacy." I'm a big believer in prioritizing actual issues over perceived issues. Using SSL search prevents bosses, ISPs, and governments from sniffing your queries, and I consider those to be the largest threats to your privacy. Some ISPs sell their customers' query data and surfing patterns, for example. In contrast, when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of user queries, Google resisted that challenge and won in court. Having worked at Google for 11+ years, I know that my colleagues care a great deal about our users' trust and privacy and work to protect it with features like SSL search, two-factor authentication, warnings when sites might be hacked or hosting malware, etc. If you're that worried about Google, don't use it, but if you still want Google results but with as much anonymization as possible, I would choose Tor+incognito-Chromium instead of Scroogle for your searches.
Shenglong 15y ago
Personalization tends to be a nice relevance improvement overall I agree completely. Reading that page, my first thought was "if (not saying I don't) Egypt is a place I probably don't plan on going to, why should I waste time looking at those links in my search results?" Overall, I think personalization (wow, this isn't a word?) reaches its own form of market efficiency. If the personalization algorithms are bad, then people would shy away from the search engines that provide them. However, if they make sense, and return the most relevant results most of the time, then that's saving us a lot of time.
nextparadigms 15y ago
I don't want to jump so many hoops just to do one damn search. Personally, I hate the country specific personalization, and perhaps it's useful to most people in my country rather than showing more US results, but I'm really not interested in those types of results myself. I wish I could just check a box in my Preferences and then be able to see the universal search results. I know I can use /ncr at the end, but I'd rather not have to do that all the time, and I think you can't even make that the default search for the Omnibox in Chrome, which means I have to give up Omnibox, which I love using, in order to get away from personalization. And even then, I think it just means I won't see my country specific results, but it probably still personalizes my search results through other types of signals. So fine, don't make universal search the default way to search, but just give me a checkbox so I can turn it on when I want to. I want to see the best results, period - not the best results for me (or whatever Google thinks are the best results for me).
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  "I want to see the best results, period - not the best results for me" But aren't you a part of the relevance equation? The ideal results for a search like [bitcoin crash] should be different for a Japanese-speaking searcher in Tokyo vs. a German-speaking searcher in Munich vs. a bitcoin expert vs. a programmer trying to diagnose why compiling bitcoin is crashing vs. my Mom who has never heard of bitcoin before, right?
  - sambe 15y ago
    But why on earth do you persistently try to present German search results to an English speaker in Munich? This has been peeve #1 for years, across all Google services.
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      Good question; one person is annoyed by this endlessly a few offices down from me. It's hard to make sure that things are handled consistently sometimes, but if you use google.com/ncr or the "Google.com in English" link at the bottom of the home page, that should help. The "Language tools" link to the right of the search box should also let you set a cookie with your language preference.
jannes 15y ago
I agree, I don't believe that over-personalization is an issue. (As I already said in another comment.) But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not. Sure, you can look at whether the browser is in incognito mode or you can look for some parameter in the URL, but these things require that you already know about personalization. In contrast to personalization there are various indicators that a page is localized. The most prominent is obviously the language of the text. As soon as all the search results are in my local language it is very obvious to me that I got localized search results. I can also detect localization by looking at the Google logo on the homepage (localized versions have the country name in grey text below the Google logo), by looking at the language of the Google interface, by remembering the domain name I used to access Google and by looking at the sidebar on the left that even displays a guess of my location on the city-level. There are no such indicators at all for filtered/personalized results. Every user around me starts with the same version of Google results. That's how everyone got acquainted with Google in the beginning. Same results for everyone. There is no reason for a user to question that until you see the differences by comparing search results, which most users won't. Someone who doesn't happen to work at Google or didn't hear about the "filter bubble" can't know that search results will start to diverge from vanilla results over time. So personalized Google results violate the principle of least astonishment. While I can't speak for other people, I think that the concerns that some people have about this are rooted in the fact that you can get trapped in some sort of feedback loop without ever knowing. If you could see that your results are personalized you could compare them to unpersonalized results and decide for yourself which you like better.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  "But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not." Sorry, this is just not the case: we do provide indication on Google's search results page for personalized results. Here's a couple links that talk about how we surface whether results have been personalized: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=93704 http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer... is our support page and http://searchengineland.com/google-now-notifies-of-search-customization-gives-searchers-control-14485 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-notifies-of-search-cu... is an article on Search Engine Land from 2008 when we started surfacing information on how results were personalized. Here's a simple demo. Do a search in Chrome incognito mode and go to the bottom of the page. You won't see a link that says "View customizations." Now do a search in regular Chrome and check for that link. When I did a search for [matt cutts] in regular Chrome, I saw the "View customizations" link, clicking the link gives this message: "Search customization details: matt cutts When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you're signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history. The following information was used to improve your search results for matt cutts: Web HistoryOne or more items in your Web History were used to improve search results. Manage Web History Remove Web History from my Google Account If you're curious, you can see what a search for matt cutts looks like without these improvements. The 'More details' link on your search results page can be used to display this page for approximately 30 minutes, after which it will no longer show this page." In other words, not only can you tell whether a search results page was personalized, you can click a link right on the search results to see exactly what criteria were used to personalize the results. And that page has a clear link to run the search again without personalization. As I mentioned before, personalization is typically a minor effect in Google's search results and it's almost always an improvement. But for people who are worried about potential "over-personalization," we do provide easy ways to see when a search was personalized, why it was personalized, and do the search again without personalization.
newman314 15y ago
Here is a slightly different question, how do you get "no country redirect" to stick reliably? I cant begin to describe how annoying it is that I am presented with a different language when travelling to a different country. All I ever want is Google in English but it keeps going back to a localized search regardless of the many times that I choose "google in english"
- avar 15y ago
  I suppose you know about http://www.google.com/ncr http://www.google.com/ncr ? It works some of the time. Some of the time it doesn't, e.g. now when Google has custom logos I'll get a search term in Dutch (I'm in The Netherlands) when I click on it, even though I'm using google.com in English when doing so.
  - newman314 15y ago
    Yes, I know about about /ncr but its hard/impossible to set that on a mobile device Also, it only works sometimes.
    - newman314 15y ago
      As yet another aside, has anyone else noticed how it is pretty much impossible to set SafeSearch to off without being logged in? Trying to set the cookie just does not seem to stick
      - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
        If you want, you can set "&safe=on" or "&safe=off" at the end of the url.
- Sephr 15y ago
  It's a shame how Google completely disregards your HTTP Accept-Language header. If they didn't, this would be much less of a problem.
jfager 15y ago
If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") "Append a cryptic query param" is a terrible user interface, and it's a little silly to suggest this as a solution. Make it an option real people can discover and use. when it launched Just curious, why add this qualification? Is it significantly different now? the impact was on the order of one search result above the fold for one in five search results. That statistic needs a little clarifying. Query terms frequency follows a power law distribution, doesn't it? So if you're counting each individual term, the fact that 1 in 20 have altered results could very easily still mean a majority of actual searches are altered. And depending on how you calculated the 'one search result above the fold' number, it could very easily still mean that when a page is altered, it's altered significantly. More interesting would be knowing these stats for just the fat head of the query term distribution.
wildlogic 15y ago
Just wanted to say thanks to Matt_Cutts for addressing many relevant issues/questions here on HN. Your responses are appreciated and not always taken for granted.

pasbesoin 15y ago

Do you have a pointer to a publicly visible reference to the definition of some of the other query string parameters Google uses? Just thought I'd ask, given the context. I've noted various references people have cobbled together, but perhaps there's something a bit more... "canonical". Thanks for the above.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/610/xml_reference.html http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/61... is a reference for our search appliance, but a lot of parameters are in common. I'm not aware of any other official Google doc available externally, but if you search for [google search url parameters] the top 3-4 results are all quite good.

mtogo 15y ago

A much better alternative is https://ssl.scroogle.org https://ssl.scroogle.org , which doesn't have personalization since google can't tell scroogle users apart. It also has benefits like having a bit of privacy while you search.

udoprog 15y ago
Which in turn, incidentally leads back to DDG : ). Crazy good stuff has been going on with DDG the latest couple of months, I'm just glad I've finally found a search provider who takes these issues seriously!
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
I think Scroogle hits Google from a relatively small set of IP addresses. Be aware that Google is probably trying to localize for those IP addresses, so your results could be less relevant (in the same way that if you searched through a proxy in Germany, you'd be more likely to get results with a German emphasis). Personally, if I have a search that feels a bit sensitive, I just hop into incognito mode in Chrome. Control-shift-N is an easy shortcut to open an incognito window in Chrome. And don't forget that you can use https://encrypted.google.com/ https://encrypted.google.com/ to do a search via SSL as well, which provides an encrypted tunnel between your browser and Google.
- mtogo 15y ago
  Your reccomendation is hilarious because it still does not give the user any privacy. Neither private browsing mode nor SSL will give the user any privacy from google, which is the real concern. You still log searches and IP addresses for an extremely long time. One solution that actually does solve this is to use Scroogle or to access google through Tor. EDIT: I feel that i should clarify that of course SSL is a very important feature to have for a whole slew of reasons and that i'm glad Google supports it, just that it wasn't relevant to my point.
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    "Your recommendation is hilarious because it still does not give the user any privacy." I'm a big believer in prioritizing actual issues over perceived issues. Using SSL search prevents bosses, ISPs, and governments from sniffing your queries, and I consider those to be the largest threats to your privacy. Some ISPs sell their customers' query data and surfing patterns, for example. In contrast, when the Department of Justice tried to subpoena two months worth of user queries, Google resisted that challenge and won in court. Having worked at Google for 11+ years, I know that my colleagues care a great deal about our users' trust and privacy and work to protect it with features like SSL search, two-factor authentication, warnings when sites might be hacked or hosting malware, etc. If you're that worried about Google, don't use it, but if you still want Google results but with as much anonymization as possible, I would choose Tor+incognito-Chromium instead of Scroogle for your searches.

Shenglong 15y ago

Personalization tends to be a nice relevance improvement overall I agree completely. Reading that page, my first thought was "if (not saying I don't) Egypt is a place I probably don't plan on going to, why should I waste time looking at those links in my search results?" Overall, I think personalization (wow, this isn't a word?) reaches its own form of market efficiency. If the personalization algorithms are bad, then people would shy away from the search engines that provide them. However, if they make sense, and return the most relevant results most of the time, then that's saving us a lot of time.

nextparadigms 15y ago

I don't want to jump so many hoops just to do one damn search. Personally, I hate the country specific personalization, and perhaps it's useful to most people in my country rather than showing more US results, but I'm really not interested in those types of results myself. I wish I could just check a box in my Preferences and then be able to see the universal search results. I know I can use /ncr at the end, but I'd rather not have to do that all the time, and I think you can't even make that the default search for the Omnibox in Chrome, which means I have to give up Omnibox, which I love using, in order to get away from personalization. And even then, I think it just means I won't see my country specific results, but it probably still personalizes my search results through other types of signals. So fine, don't make universal search the default way to search, but just give me a checkbox so I can turn it on when I want to. I want to see the best results, period - not the best results for me (or whatever Google thinks are the best results for me).

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
"I want to see the best results, period - not the best results for me" But aren't you a part of the relevance equation? The ideal results for a search like [bitcoin crash] should be different for a Japanese-speaking searcher in Tokyo vs. a German-speaking searcher in Munich vs. a bitcoin expert vs. a programmer trying to diagnose why compiling bitcoin is crashing vs. my Mom who has never heard of bitcoin before, right?
- sambe 15y ago
  But why on earth do you persistently try to present German search results to an English speaker in Munich? This has been peeve #1 for years, across all Google services.
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    Good question; one person is annoyed by this endlessly a few offices down from me. It's hard to make sure that things are handled consistently sometimes, but if you use google.com/ncr or the "Google.com in English" link at the bottom of the home page, that should help. The "Language tools" link to the right of the search box should also let you set a cookie with your language preference.

jannes 15y ago

I agree, I don't believe that over-personalization is an issue. (As I already said in another comment.) But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not. Sure, you can look at whether the browser is in incognito mode or you can look for some parameter in the URL, but these things require that you already know about personalization. In contrast to personalization there are various indicators that a page is localized. The most prominent is obviously the language of the text. As soon as all the search results are in my local language it is very obvious to me that I got localized search results. I can also detect localization by looking at the Google logo on the homepage (localized versions have the country name in grey text below the Google logo), by looking at the language of the Google interface, by remembering the domain name I used to access Google and by looking at the sidebar on the left that even displays a guess of my location on the city-level. There are no such indicators at all for filtered/personalized results. Every user around me starts with the same version of Google results. That's how everyone got acquainted with Google in the beginning. Same results for everyone. There is no reason for a user to question that until you see the differences by comparing search results, which most users won't. Someone who doesn't happen to work at Google or didn't hear about the "filter bubble" can't know that search results will start to diverge from vanilla results over time. So personalized Google results violate the principle of least astonishment. While I can't speak for other people, I think that the concerns that some people have about this are rooted in the fact that you can get trapped in some sort of feedback loop without ever knowing. If you could see that your results are personalized you could compare them to unpersonalized results and decide for yourself which you like better.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
"But here's why some people probably don't like personalization: It's invisible. There is nothing on the results page that tells you whether your results are personalized or not." Sorry, this is just not the case: we do provide indication on Google's search results page for personalized results. Here's a couple links that talk about how we surface whether results have been personalized: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=93704 http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer... is our support page and http://searchengineland.com/google-now-notifies-of-search-customization-gives-searchers-control-14485 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-notifies-of-search-cu... is an article on Search Engine Land from 2008 when we started surfacing information on how results were personalized. Here's a simple demo. Do a search in Chrome incognito mode and go to the bottom of the page. You won't see a link that says "View customizations." Now do a search in regular Chrome and check for that link. When I did a search for [matt cutts] in regular Chrome, I saw the "View customizations" link, clicking the link gives this message: "Search customization details: matt cutts When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you're signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history. The following information was used to improve your search results for matt cutts: Web HistoryOne or more items in your Web History were used to improve search results. Manage Web History Remove Web History from my Google Account If you're curious, you can see what a search for matt cutts looks like without these improvements. The 'More details' link on your search results page can be used to display this page for approximately 30 minutes, after which it will no longer show this page." In other words, not only can you tell whether a search results page was personalized, you can click a link right on the search results to see exactly what criteria were used to personalize the results. And that page has a clear link to run the search again without personalization. As I mentioned before, personalization is typically a minor effect in Google's search results and it's almost always an improvement. But for people who are worried about potential "over-personalization," we do provide easy ways to see when a search was personalized, why it was personalized, and do the search again without personalization.

newman314 15y ago

Here is a slightly different question, how do you get "no country redirect" to stick reliably? I cant begin to describe how annoying it is that I am presented with a different language when travelling to a different country. All I ever want is Google in English but it keeps going back to a localized search regardless of the many times that I choose "google in english"

avar 15y ago
I suppose you know about http://www.google.com/ncr http://www.google.com/ncr ? It works some of the time. Some of the time it doesn't, e.g. now when Google has custom logos I'll get a search term in Dutch (I'm in The Netherlands) when I click on it, even though I'm using google.com in English when doing so.
- newman314 15y ago
  Yes, I know about about /ncr but its hard/impossible to set that on a mobile device Also, it only works sometimes.
  - newman314 15y ago
    As yet another aside, has anyone else noticed how it is pretty much impossible to set SafeSearch to off without being logged in? Trying to set the cookie just does not seem to stick
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      If you want, you can set "&safe=on" or "&safe=off" at the end of the url.
Sephr 15y ago
It's a shame how Google completely disregards your HTTP Accept-Language header. If they didn't, this would be much less of a problem.

jfager 15y ago

If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search") "Append a cryptic query param" is a terrible user interface, and it's a little silly to suggest this as a solution. Make it an option real people can discover and use. when it launched Just curious, why add this qualification? Is it significantly different now? the impact was on the order of one search result above the fold for one in five search results. That statistic needs a little clarifying. Query terms frequency follows a power law distribution, doesn't it? So if you're counting each individual term, the fact that 1 in 20 have altered results could very easily still mean a majority of actual searches are altered. And depending on how you calculated the 'one search result above the fold' number, it could very easily still mean that when a page is altered, it's altered significantly. More interesting would be knowing these stats for just the fat head of the query term distribution.

wildlogic 15y ago

Just wanted to say thanks to Matt_Cutts for addressing many relevant issues/questions here on HN. Your responses are appreciated and not always taken for granted.