A quick train tour of Google's personalized results
All aboard for a quick train trip into Google's personalized results. Choo Choo!
This past week Mallory (heretofore referred to as "Last Week's Employee of the Week" or LWEotW) asked the question, "How many businesses out there probably don't know about personalized results and think their rankings are way different than what they actually are?"
C'mon ride the train...
I started to laugh before catching myself. This is a good question. As an SEO it's really easy to sit to close to your industry and just assume everyone knows about personalized results. Don't know what personalized results are? Climb aboard the train for a quick example.
The Google is watching you
Google wants to give you results that you like. That's why you don't use Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos (insert more unused, dead or dying search engines here), etc. etc. Whether your logged in or not, Google likes to personalize your results and has been doing this since last year. So let's play a little game here.
You want to take a train vacation across the United States. Your first Google search is for "rail vacations". You'll see that Vacations By Rail is owning the first few listings and the next competitor listed is America By Rail.
So you want a rail vacation, do you?
Let's say you decide to click on America By Rail. You click around their site, jot down some notes and go make yourself a nice bowl of crab bisque. After your bisque you decide to go search for some more info. Over the next few weeks you go back to the America By Rail site, but since you never remember the URL you use Google and type in "America By Rail" and click on the first result to browse the site some more. The Google starts to realize that you like this site, and once it does, it will start adjusting the search results to your personal preferences. A few weeks later you may decide to search for "train tours".
If Google has started personalizing your results - you'll likely see America By Rail in the top 3 results, though, if you had never run the previous searches America By Rail wouldn't even show on the first page of results.
&pws=0
You want to de-personalize your results? After you run a search go up to the address bar of your browser (you know, the place with this - http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=train+tours) and scroll to the end of it and add this string of characters - &pws=0 so that the previous address becomes http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=train+tours&pws=0
This tells Google to remove the personalized results. If you do a lot of searches in a category, give this a quick whirl and see how drastically it changes your results.
I realize this is a little rudimentary for any of you seasoned SEO types out there, but I really felt like this is a useful piece of information out there for casual searchers and small business owners who don't stay up on some of the subtle changes that really affect Google results. My bet is there are a lot of small business owners out there that Google their own company regularly and have a very false perception of how well they rank in Google (especially if they don't pay attention to their web analytics!) A special thanks to LWEotW for bringing this up.
Tags: de-personalizing google search, google personalized search, google search results, google spying, rail vacations, train tours, train vacations
