Google’s search algorithm has gotten very smart over the years…perhaps too smart for its own good. Based on your search preferences and involvement with the Google+ community and that community’s search interests, Google can shape the results your receive tremendously. Historically, this tends to be a good thing, but for those that want results that can be arguably the most “pure”, you might want to opt out of this ‘smarter search result and prediction’ option, as Google calls it.
If you aren’t logged into Google while doing searches, you don’t have to worry about the personalization method over time. But who wants to log out of Google every time they want to do a search? The first link you’ll go to is here for the opportunity to opt out of Google securing your history. Once here, you can go to the gear in the top right corner and click for “settings”. From there, you can turn off Google search!
You will always get local results based on your location, which you can actually change as well. Let’s say you don’t want to see search results in one city, and you’d prefer to see what people in another city would see (for any number of reasons). See the following picture for the steps taken in that situation.
At that point, you will get the common local results, which could help for anything from seeing what great restaurants and entertainment there is in a city you’re visiting, to doing some advanced competitor research.
Disabling personalized results gives you a clear cut way of seeing how you’re ranking for different keywords and showing up online without too much hassle. If you have any more questions about this technique or different ways of using Google as your default search engine, contact the experts over at Market My Market today!