December 08, 2009

All Google Searches Are Now Automatically 'Personalized' even if you're not logged into a Google account (coookeees!). You can opt OUT (not a 'one-click' process, though).

This won't 'kill' SEO sez one SEO blog, but it'll sure hurt it: that's the good news. The bad news: if things you don't like (Scientology, Sarah Palin, asparagus) keep showing up in your search results, it's your own damn fault. And if you're logged into Gmail (or any other Google Service... no, I don't have any Wave invites), you're logged in.

posted by wendell 15 years ago
  • From the article: "For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes." This is stupid with a side of stupid and a Big Gulp of Dumb, to go. Served with a spicy sauce of insult. If I often click on epicurious.com. I know the fucking thing is out there and can go there if I want; maybe I'm searching for recipes instead of going straight to epicurious because I want to see what everyone else has that looks good in the results. I do this at work regularly; there are sites that always come up high in my search results, and I'll go to them if I don't see anything else that looks better in the first page or so of results (for personal searches, I'll go past the first page). If you routinely click on something that shows high in the list to begin with, this will just guarantee that it will move even higher and possibly get more clicks from you. Bah. Maybe Google thinks that their users are too stupid to remember the sites they go to often. Honestly, they're probably right but surely they could find some other way to help them out without roping me in and screwing up my search results.
  • I agree. Probably one of the few things I *do* use google search for these days is recipes, too.
  • I, for one, would *love* it if they did this. I want to black list sites, because they NEVER have anything I can use. Can google do this for me? If I click on one more stupid "experts-exchange.com" link from google, I'll scream.
  • MonkeyFilter: stupid with a side of stupid and a Big Gulp of Dumb, to go heh. I used to like to google....
  • Well, anything that annoys the SEO sleazebags can't be all bad.
  • The crap thing is, the more evil Google gets the more of their stuff I find myself using. I mean, look at Yahoo - they FORCE that damn toolbar down your throat every chance they get, in every installer everywhere, and I hate them for it - but I pay them annually for Flickr. And I despise Microsoft for their idiot business practices and shitty treatment of any platform not owned by them, their asinine pushes against open-source and refusal to admit that 99% of the problems on the internet could be solved if they had half a brain about security - but I paid the MS tax for years and still use their utter crap Office suite on my Mac. And Apple. Committed to obsolescence, because they make no money on software, even their laptops are now giant iPods with nonremovable batteries. Zero support for non-Apple anything (software, peripherals, parts, etc.) Secretive to the point of scariness. But I own three Macs, three iPods and two iPhones. Hell. All those tech companies are evil in some sense or other. Google is apparently the only one I don't give any money to.