I've been very interested in personalized search and Google for some time now. It use to be talked about way more in the past but these days, you barely hear anything about it. In fact, I use to use a search parameter that removed personalization, such as adding &pws=0 to the end of the URL string. These days, I barely ever use it - I go incognito.
In short, I wonder how much of the search results are really personalized these days outside of local specific geo information.
Gary Illyes answered a bunch of questions around personalized search from Dawn Anderson over the weekend. He said that personalized search uses previous search history but not the age of the user. Here are those tweets:
@dawnieando @JohnMu Not really, no. You can try this in an incognito window or tab
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 22, 2017
@dawnieando @JohnMu Yes
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 22, 2017
@dawnieando @JohnMu Yup
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 22, 2017
Truth is, this is nothing new from years and years ago. I am a bit surprised Google has not done more with personalized data in the organic results. But I guess not much has changed on the personalization front...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
