Earlier this week Google announced Search Plus Your World, which personalizes your search results based on the connections and relationships that you develop using Google+. Basically, content shared from your various circles will be given priority within the search results. So far, the reaction towards this new product has been pretty mixed.
Now, in my own personal experience with the product, which has only been a few days, I can personally say that I don't find it very useful. Just running a sample search for "star wars", half of my first page results were posts from this very blog. Because of this, I've looked for a way to disable this new feature.
On a conference call yesterday with my Google rep (I work in paid search), I had asked if there was a way to opt out of Search Plus Your World since it is the new default. Sadly, I didn't get an answer. However, because I'm a nerd, I started playing around with my search settings and discovered a way that will allow you to set Google's old search results as the default.
Off to the right of Google's results page, you'll find the Settings icon. Click on that and select "Search Settings" from the drop down.
From there, if you scroll down, you'll see the "Personal results" section. Just select "Do not use personal results" and click save. Now when you perform a search on Google, you'll be presented with "actual" results.
If you find the need to check out the personalized results again, you can always switch over using the Search Plus Your World toggle located towards the right.
Stay nerdy my friends.
You may want to check out the solution provided at http://www.focusontheuser.org/. I am mainly testing it to see if there is any more utility in the number of social results SPYW provides when Facebook and Twitter are added to the mix.
ReplyDeleteI don't care about my results. I care about other peoples results. Duh.
ReplyDeleteThis was helpful, thanks. I was encountering the same problem that you described.
ReplyDeleteActually, I just tried to follow your instructions and found that "Personal Results" no longer shows under Search Settings.
DeleteHmm. It looks like they may have disabled it for right now. The people and world icons are gone now too. Maybe they backed out of it.
Delete