You Can Prevent Google From Personalizing Search Results
Google has already been criticized for putting search results in a ” filter bubble “. This is because Google uses data from every search you make to create a profile of you and tailors all future search results accordingly. Over time, you’ll eventually see the results you like, but that means you may sometimes miss useful results outside of your regular corner of the internet. Google is now offering a new toggle to make it easier to turn off personalized search results, which could be one way to avoid the bubble.
How to disable personalized Google search results
Turning off personalized search results is easy enough on paper, and has actually been happening for decades, but it can be tricky to get you to display a new toggle. Try searching something on Google and scrolling to the bottom of the results page. Beneath the Goooooooogle logo and page numbers, you can see a small line of text that says “Results are Personalized.” Click the “Try without personalization” button next to it. Personalized Google search results will be disabled.
This feature was first discovered by the Search Engine Roundtable , although it’s unclear why it doesn’t always appear.
If you don’t see the new switch, the website also states that you can still add &pws=0 to the end of any Google search URL to remove personalization, a method that was reported back in 2007 . Alternatively, open your Google account settings and go to the Data & Privacy tab. Then uncheck the box under Personalize Search . Click here to go directly to the page you need.
To make sure your results are no longer personalized, try your search again and scroll down the page again. The text “Results are personalized” should have changed to “Results are not personalized”. You’ll have to turn off personalization individually on each device or browser you use for Google search.
I tried this in several different browsers and in most cases I saw that the results were not personalized by default. This is probably because I actively reject Google’s annoying cookie banners every time, or because I unknowingly changed one of the many settings on the site. When I went back and accepted the cookie popup, I finally saw the option to stop personalization.
While this feature is nice to have, you should know that you won’t be able to truly escape Google’s filter bubble if that’s the only search engine you use, since the site still makes a lot of behind-the-scenes decisions about what to show. There are plenty of other great alternatives to Google , including paid search engine Kagi , that will allow you to avoid this bubble.