Google is Messing with My Searches
Posted by Evan at 8:51 pm on September 13th, 2009
Some time ago Google rolled out a "feature" whereby your searches would be personalized based on your web history (as tracked by Google, if you authorized them to collect such data). At this point in my life I don't care if Google keeps information like this about my searches (after all, nothing on the internet is private) and the statistics this archive of searches provides are quite interesting: I can see how many searches I've performed each day for the past month, which pages I visited as a result of a given search, in which hour of the day I perform the most searches, and even which day is the most popular search day for me (Tuesday is currently the record holder: over time I have performed over 200 more searches on Tuesdays than any other day - I'm not sure why that is, but now I'm very curious :).
In a nutshell: I want to keep this web history around. Unfortunately Google doesn't provide an option to have the web history and yet still get "natural" search results. So you can either have the web history and let Google mess with the ordering of the results or you can abandon the history and get pristine results.
Google, why do you force me to pick!?!
I don't want my search results to be different than someone else's just because we have different web histories. Keeping the search results the same helps people share links and searches, and surely that's a good thing! Also, I have only noticed worse results following Google's personalization modifications.
This is especially a problem when repeatedly performing searches to determine the popularity of a term or subject. Since you've visited some of the results which were high on the list previously, on subsequent searches you're not likely to revisit them. But Google mistakenly takes your non-visits as an indication that you don't want those results and so over time they'll be moved down the priority list, thus making Google's results utterly useless as a measure of popularity.
An example of this would be a vanity search in order to see what the state of my name is. Naturally I'm not inclined to click on the links to my own sites: I already know about those! But since I didn't click on them Google assumes I don't care about them and over time the ordering of the search results changes. It has gotten to the point where when I want an unbiased view of a search I must open a new browser and then do my search there (where I'm not logged in to Google).
This system doesn't make sense to me. Google, please give me a way to stay logged in, with my web history, and yet still have pristine search results!
In the meantime, sadly, the web history will need to go: this issue has gotten way out of hand.
</rant>
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