[achille]

Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience

1. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com

2. Set the default search engine to: https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s

Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.

[bajsejohannes]

Thank you.

> a person who searches for "Harry Potter," and then for "Amazon," actually wants "Harry Potter" results from Amazon.com Inc.

For my case, this would never be true. I would simply append "amazon" to the original search. Now, I could probably train myself to not do that, but I don't want to. I don't want my search engine to have any kind of state, but unfortunately Google thinks I want the opposite.

I guess I want Google to be purely functional. The same query will give the same answer, no matter who asks it and no matter where in the world it's asked. I certainly don't want Google to create a little filter bubble just for me.

[epi0Bauqu]

Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately -- though is a good start at protecting yourself.

[achille]

Sorry, meant to say depersonalize. Care to expand why this doesn't work? Just ran the same test, and I see the exact same results.

[epi0Bauqu]

Yes, what you said sounds plausible and is indeed intuitive, but we've found it empirically to be untrue.

In fact, on fresh private mode browsing (cookies cleared) when people searched for the same result at the same time, we still saw significant variation in results, even in the same country and on non-location results.

[moultano]

This may have nothing to do with personalization. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-... "We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches."

Many small experiments can lead to differences for a reasonably large fraction of queries.