Google Search is the most popular search engine on the Internet covering about two-thirds of all searches made on the Internet. Earlier, Google offered personalized search to users who had a free Google Account and had logged in to that account. Personalized search basically means showing you search results that are more relevant to you, and these search results are shown on the basis of your past search / browsing behavior observed by Google. Now, even if you’re not logged in to your Google Account and/or even if you don’t have a free Google Account, Google will show you personalized search results when you search any term at Google Search. Thus, personalized search will be available to all persons using Google Search. However, depending upon whether or not you are signed in to a free Google Account at the time of searching an expression, the personalized search will use different information to customize your search results. If you don’t want personalized search, then you’ve to specifically turn off this feature as explained in this article. This means that instead of being an “opt-in” feature, personalized search from Google is now “opt-out” feature, i.e., everybody gets personalized search until he or she opts out of it.
With personalized search, while using search at Google, you’ll get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features. So, now you’ll get two different types of personalized search at Google:
(1) Signed-in personalization: When you are signed in to your free Google Account at the time of conducting a search, Google will personalize your search results based on your Web History stored by Google in your account. You’ve the option to turn off Web History and remove it from your free Google Account, and this will also remove the feature of receiving personalized search results while you are signed in. To learn more about how to turn off Web History, read this article; this article also explains that you can remove individual items from your Web History.
(2) Signed-out personalization: Even when you don’t have a free Google Account or when you are not signed in to your Google Account if you’ve one, while conducting a search, Google will customize your search results based on your past search information stored in a cookie that is linked to your browser. This cookie will have information about up to 180 days of your search activity, including search queries and search results that you click. This information will actually be stored on Google’s servers but it will be linked to an anonymous cookie that is stored on your computer. Of course, at any time you can delete this cookie that is stored on your computer, which means that your search customization information stored till that time will get lost. Learn more about cookies and how to remove cookies.
Remember that if more people use your computer, the browser cookie containing customization search information may actually relate to search activity of all these persons.
In case you don’t want personalized search results when you search at Google, you can turn off or disable this feature which means that you’ll no more get customized search results based on your search history.
You can turn off both types of personalized search results, i.e., for signed-in searches and for signed-out searches, as explained below:
(1) Disable signed-in personalized search: To disable personalized search based on your Web History associated with your free Google Account, i.e., the signed-in search customization, you’ll have to remove Web History from your Google Account. You can remove the entire Web History or you can remove individual items in your web history. To learn more about how to turn off Web History (and thereby to turn off personalized search based on that), read this article.
(2) Disable signed-out personalized search: As already explained, at the time of conducting a search if you are not signed in to your Google Account or if you don’t have any Google Account, you’ll still get personalized search based on your past search information stored on Google servers and linked to a cookie on your browser. To disable this search customization, click Web History in the top-right corner of the search results page. On the next page that appears on the screen, click Disable customizations. This will disable personalized search based on cookie stored on your computer. Instead of completely disabling personalized search in this manner, you also have the option of deleting the current cookie, which means that your existing search information history will get deleted and you can start with a fresh personalized search experience. Learn more about cookies and how to remove cookies.
Please remember that the information about your having disabled your personalized search is itself stored in a cookie on your computer. Therefore, subsequent to disabling personalized search, if you delete the cookies, you may again have to disable personalized search using above method.
Learn more about personalized search by watching the following YouTube video from Google:
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