Maybe I'm alone here, but I have an extreme distaste for personalized search results. I know what I want to see; it's pretty rare search knows what I want to see when it's trying.
Take the "chips" example from the interview--maybe I'm tired of eating the same fucking chips every day. Maybe I just want to know what the most popular options out there are without having to scroll a lot. Not to mention that I have a preference for Pringles, I'm going to type the brand name into the search when I want to find it. (If I'm a dog lover, I don't expect Google to rank dog results first when I type in "animals." I expect information about animals in general.)