How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out

Jun
09

At SMX Matt Cutts said you can turn Google's personalized web search results off by adding &pws=0 to the URL of a search query. If you are logged into your Google Account this link shows your personalized version, while this one shows the general unpersonalized SERP.

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That's a great tip. It is always such a pain to have to log out of my Google account to see where my websites are ranking. Thanks!

dave clarke on June 09, 2007 10:56 AM

Turning off search history has the same affect?

Richard Hearne on June 09, 2007 11:15 AM

Thank you for publishing the tip. I was just talking to a colleague about this yesterday and how I wish you didn't have to log in/out of your Google account in order to see general results.

Great tip... Now someone needs to write a Firefox extension to append this to every Google query.

Good to know, i always thought some of the keywords i seo'd for sites did'nt show up. But know i think i have a clue ;)

Thanks

Adeel Shahid on June 11, 2007 07:20 AM

Laura commented on the wrong post..

"Hmmm. I wonder what PWS stands for.

Personal Watcher Shutoff?

Play With Search?

What do you think?"

I think personalized web search is probably a good guess.

hello mr. aaron, you may find this tool usefull
http://www.presseblog.at/depersonalizer/

it's a search engine wrapper over google using the parameter you described (thanks matt cutt for the info). it also has a "comparison mode" where you can compare the personalized SERPs with the unpersonalized SERPs.

franz enzenhofer on June 12, 2007 12:48 PM

hello mr. aaron, you may find this tool usefull
http://www.presseblog.at/depersonalizer/

it's a search engine wrapper over google using the parameter you described (thanks matt cutt for the info). it also has a "comparison mode" where you can compare the personalized SERPs with the unpersonalized SERPs.

franz enzenhofer on June 12, 2007 12:49 PM

I couldn't get a change on anything I searched

Nice Catch Aaron. Dont have to keep logging out to check things and logging back in.

As to comment above my guess would be that 'pws' must stand for Personalized Web Search

Michael Briggs on June 13, 2007 02:40 PM

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