
Ask HN: Turning off Google's “personalisation.” - todayiamme
Google personalises for your IP and region, which is all fine and dandy until;<p>- your phone gets updated to speak in a different accent<p>- the number system changes to one you don&#x27;t recognise<p>- local results are prioritised above the results you want<p>- the play store tries to restrict the apps you can download<p>Localisation started off as a helpful feature, but the problem is that I can&#x27;t turn it off. There is no setting within Google products to turn it off - setting your search preferences to google.com&#x2F;ncr does not work. The only way out is to manually go to google.com&#x2F;ncr and search from there every time.<p>There is a similar case to be made for the individualised personalisation Google does for search results. It initially started off as a really great tool for a few queries, but it is now an obstacle in my workflow. And I can&#x27;t turn it off. Google offers me no setting that I can change and pws=0 has stopped working. Initially it didn&#x27;t work with Google Instant, but now it doesn&#x27;t work with Instant turned off - at least as far as I can detect.<p>Is there some way for me to access &quot;vanilla&quot; Google? Or a better alternative?<p>I am willing to sacrifice their attempts to read my mind for quicker and more accurate search results.
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thaumasiotes
> the number system changes to one you don't recognise

Man, that one's aggravating. I didn't even think it would be considered weird
to want my phone's UI to be in my own language, but for phone numbers to
appear with formatting appropriate to the country they're for. Shoehorning
every number in "contacts" into US-style 1-XXX-XXX-XXXX just because I report
that I speak US english is a usability disaster.

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jeffmould
You can turn off, or at least adjust some, through your account dashboard.

If you are in Chrome and logged in to your Google, simply click on your
account icon in the top right and click My Account. There is an array of
settings if you start diving into it regarding your privacy settings and how
Google uses your information to customize your experience. Not sure if you can
turn it completely off, but you can at least limit it to some point.

~~~
todayiamme
I haven't logged into Chrome, as I want to avoid giving Google even more
information to "personalise" my search results with. Is this dashboard
different from the default search settings page Google takes you to? If so,
then is there any other way for me to access it?

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dsschnau
DuckDuckGo is a great alternative

