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

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.