How to Disable Google Personalized Search

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

How to Disable Google Personalized Search

In February, Google Personalized Search got out of beta and was enabled by default in every Google account. To personalize your search results, Google uses more sources, the most important one being search history. You can pause or even delete the search history, but you may find it useful for future reference.

If you don't want personalized search results, Google recommends to log out, but this may not be the best option if you use other Google services at the same time (for example, you edit a document in Google Docs).

The "deus ex machina" in this story is the pws parameter that can be added to the address of a search results page to control the personalization.

This URL corresponds to a search for [Google blog] without personalization:
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog&pws=0.

Try it when you're logged in and compare it to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog.

How to temporarily disable Google Personalized Search? Add &pws=0 in the address bar at the end of a Google search URL. Or drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar:

Turn off Google personalization

Unfortunately, the parameter is not persistent, so this only works for the current query. If you want to add a link that disables the personalized search, this Greasemonkey script will help you (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey or Opera).

Labels: Greasemonkey, Web Search

10 comments ( Post a comment )

Philipp Lenssen said on April 17, 2007 11:13 AM PDT:

Cool tip.

Dominik said on April 17, 2007 10:34 PM PDT:

Does not work.
The 'pws=0' paramter seems to be ignored.

Ionut Alex Chitu said on April 17, 2007 10:59 PM PDT:

It works, Dominik, but try it for queries for which Google shows you personalized results. When you get personalized results, Google displays: "Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about...", in contrast to the typical "Results 1 - 10 of about...".

Hint: Google shows personalized results for queries similar to (related to) previous queries from your search history.

Anonymous said on May 14, 2007 7:13 AM PDT:

Doesn't work.

Ionut Alex Chitu said on May 14, 2007 7:28 AM PDT:

The script is way too simple not to work.

Anonymous said on June 25, 2007 7:48 AM PDT:

like dominik said: the pws=0 paramter seems to be ignored.

is there any other solution to this? :-)

Ionut Alex Chitu said on June 25, 2007 8:15 AM PDT:

The pws parameter and logging out are the only solutions if you want to use google.com. You can also try direct IP addresses like http://72.14.209.99/ or other sites that use Google's results (AOL Search, Netscape Search).

Note that only few queries show personalized results, so setting pws=0 doesn't have any effect if the search results page isn't personalized. Try it for queries you repeat often or for general search terms ("news", "music" etc).

Anonymous said on August 15, 2008 5:19 AM PDT:

This has absolutely no effect on the jamming and flood systems fron us dhs and customs that targetedly prevent legitimate search results.

tobyism said on November 7, 2008 1:08 PM PDT:

Do you have Personalized Search turned on in your Google account?

Myke Black said on April 29, 2009 6:43 AM PDT:

try turning off your web history. That prevents the personalized search from using your previous activity to modify the serps

What do you think?