Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Search engines

Turning Off Google’s New Personal Search Setting

This week, Google made a huge change to the way search results are delivered. If you are logged into your Google account while searching (e.g., you’ve recently logged into Gmail or Google Calendar in your browser), then the search results you will see will be heavily populated by items that are connected to you in ways that Google is aware of. Google says that when you are signed in and run a search, you’ll see results that will include items from:

Google products: Search for publicly and privately shared content visible to you, like your Google+ (and Picasa) photos and Google+ posts from your friends.

Social Search: Discover relevant images and pages shared by people in your Google+ circles and by suggested connections.

Web History: Get customized results based on your past search activity on Google, such as searches you’ve done or results you’ve clicked. Learn more about Web History

Profiles in search: When you search for a friend’s name, you might see a link to the relevant Google+ profile in the list of autocomplete predictions. With personal results, you’re more likely to see your friend John’s profile than some John you’ve never met.

After Frank Donnelly shared with me this eye-opening post from Gizmodo about why some people might switch from Google to Bing as their default search engine, I decided to investigate how to turn off Google personal search (i.e., how to opt out).

Here are the steps to get to the settings options in Google when you are logged in:

In the upper right corner, look for the gears icon that gets you to the settings for your Google account:

Select “Search setttings”

On the search settings page that opens, scroll down to “Personal Results” to select “Do not use personal results.”