
How do you completely de-personalize Google results? - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog - ricg
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-completely-de-personalize-google-results.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yegg+%28Gabriel+Weinberg%27s+Blog%29
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andybak
Is it an oddly academic question?

If every search is personalised then what does a personalisation-free search
tell you? It's possible that it will no be closer to what most people see as
very few people jump through the hoops you're jumping through.

It might even be less like the majority of search results.

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etherealG
I think the crux is objectivity vs subjectivity. You'd like to be able to get
an objective set of results to a query.

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pbhjpbhj
andybak's point is a good one though, if you get an objective SERP then that's
not going to tell you anything very useful as all your potential customers are
getting a personalised version.

Looks like an opening: have a group of users sorted across demographics that
you can automatically send a query too. The system returns the SERPs from each
user and compiles a master SERP showing position based on demographics of the
user? So you can, say, run a search for "search engine" across 1000 user
machines and then look at average placement (with variance) for Windows 7
users aged 30+ in USA, or whatever.

You could probably do a similar thing with Tor (or a botnet) but the
relationship between the SERP data and the demographic of the user is probably
the most pertinent information and that would be lost then.

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andybak
The snag is that running searches on other people's profile will alter that
profile. The results will be less accurate over time.

Not to mention they would get some very strange things popping in Google Now!
Oh, it's a tangled web we weave...

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pbhjpbhj
I'm too skeptical.

This looks like the sort of post you'd write if you wanted lots of people to
search for "search engine", normally and with Tor, and click on your result;
wide-scale social engineering. Like a pick-pocket putting up a "beware of
pick-pocketers" sign.

Would be interested to see if there is a surge in the stats for visits from
Google SERPs (over Tor) following this post.

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GBond
Yes, you are.

And if I were skeptical, i'd say its the sort of post you write if you were an
advisor/investor of a competing SE that features user privacy.

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epi0Bauqu
I'm the OP. The traffic from that query is negligible for us. My proximate
motivation was to answer the question posed and the specific questions at the
bottom of the post. My root motivation is to better understand the
implications of the Filter Bubble.

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pbhjpbhj
Oh verily. It's more a mental condition on my part I think ... I was just
about to check the link and then #bam# ...

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kingrolo
ctrl+shift+n (incognito window).

At least gets around the Google login / plus / social info. Still going to
have something to do with your location, but I guess there are no totally
objective results if you consider that part of the search personalising.

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acabal
I think it also has to do with where your IP is geolocated. I was testing
search results for my site, Scribophile, which is a writing community. When
searched from a fresh US IP, it ranked 3rd in the results. When searched from
a fresh EU IP, it ranks 4th, with a UK-only writing website taking the 3rd
spot.

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goodside
Issue automated searches for the term you're interested in from VPS/cloud
servers in multiple geographic locations at random times during the day over
the course of a few weeks, shuffling your user agents between the current
popular browsers. Take some average of the SERP rankings.

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dchuk
An average ranking would be no different than a personalized one in terms of
accurracy

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forgetcolor
reminds me of this artwork, personal depersonalization system,
[http://bengrosser.com/projects/personal-depersonalization-
sy...](http://bengrosser.com/projects/personal-depersonalization-system/) . he
wrote code to clutter his google history with junk by continuously searching
for dictionary words, changing location, etc.

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DanielBMarkham
Not only does personalization change things around, but time of day and IP
location seem to affect things as well. I think.

So I have a site that was ranking around #18. On weekends, it drops down to
around #30. Then at some times of day it might rise as high as #16.

It's like Google is also creating a time/location model of content.

All this stuff with Google is all so much reading the tea leaves, though. Very
frustrating. If your marketing consisted of having a few signs around town you
could easily go out and count the traffic and observe patterns. With Google,
it's much more random and complex.

