Google Search has a new button at the bottom of the search results that shows you if the results are personalized or not and a way to turn off personalization.
Google can say the “Results are personalized – Try without personalization” and clicking on that would then flip to Google showing “Results are not personalized.”
Here is what it looks like when it says “Results are not personalized.”
I think Google recently added this because many of us are noticing higher level of personalized Google Search results and Google wants to make it clearer to us when the results are personalized and when they are not.
All this does it add the PWS=0 parameter to the query, which has led to unpersonalized results in Google Serch for over a decade.
Hat tips to:
@rustybrick is this is something new? I haven’t seen anything like this in a while. Browsed in Incognito mode! pic.twitter.com/FK1yadaZcL
— Sandeep (@itsmesande3p) December 5, 2024
@rustybrick When were these massages introduced?
FYI: The pws=0 parameter disables personalization. pic.twitter.com/NXMFvrVjiw— Kenichi Suzuki💫鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) December 5, 2024
I’m not sure whether this is a new feature or not, but it seems new to me because Google is showing personalized search results. I noticed an option that says ‘Try without personalization,’ which lets me turn off this personalization.
is this new? @rustybrick @glenngabe pic.twitter.com/oSJ4Y5e9Ns
— Vijay Chauhan 📈 (@VijayChauhanSEO) December 5, 2024
This is also interesting:
Also, I’m now NOT seeing messaging in “About this result” about personalization. That was removed recently. Very interesting things Google is doing with this… Here is what I see now (first screenshot), and here is a screenshot from a SEL post about the feature (showing the… pic.twitter.com/je4ctFHE3y
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 5, 2024
Forum discussion at X.
Update: A Google spokesperson sent us the following statement:
This change makes it easier for people to get an accurate understanding of whether their results have been personalized, while also providing them with the opportunity to explore non-personalized results. We also make it easy for people to adjust their personalization settings at any time.