I'm not entirely sure disabling the personalization effect would have been the wrong thing to do from a user experience point-of-view. Supposed I let a friend browse on my computer, do I really want my search results to be personalized with stuff that interests him/her? What about pages I mis-clicked on or pages that whose link was misleading?
I think that requiring a deliberate, conscious vote of confidence from the user for a web-page before actually letting it affect my personalized search results is a very good thing.
But from a public relations POV you're probably right, that was the best approach
I think that requiring a deliberate, conscious vote of confidence from the user for a web-page before actually letting it affect my personalized search results is a very good thing.
But from a public relations POV you're probably right, that was the best approach