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Comment by bhavin | Hacker News Reader

I would like to point out one interesting thing I noticed today. I was looking for "gcc optimization flags for xeon".

Following query is from google.com and contains no efreedom on the front page. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gcc+optimization+fl...

Now, the same query from google.ie (ireland site) contains 2 efreedom on the top page!

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=gcc+optimization+fla...

Why this strange search behavior to a query which has no relevance to user's location?

P.S. I was logged on to my google account while searching, not sure if that has any effect whatsoever.

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The high-order bit for me is that Stack Overflow is #1 for both pages. We can do localization based on TLD: the query [bank] will return different results on google.com vs. google.ie, for example. Without doing a deep dig yet, we might have thought that open-mag.com was more helpful for European searchers, for example. It looks like that site is based in Portugal.

Kudos for keeping locational variety. Is there a flag/keyword we can enter into the search to ignore location?

Such a flag would be reallllllly handy. I constantly switch between google's .com/.nl sites based on what language i'm searching in and what I'm looking for.

Agreed

http://google.com/#q=kudos&hl=fi&gl=fi

hl refers to the UI language and gl to localized results.

Some people may recommend http://www.google.com/ncr, but have you tried actually asking for English when you request pages on Google? It sounds like you don't have your Accept-Language header set to English. If an Accept-Language: en header doesn't fix the problem, you should complain on HN (with a new thread) about it instead of using /ncr. Google really should support that.

UPDATE: I am even more surprised to see that when I logged out of my account and searched again on google.ie, one of the efreedom disappeared!!

So, does this mean that Google search now takes into account my past search result clicks (or rather mis-clicks)? Or ranks contents in someway that proves efreedom is somehow more relevant to me?

If you're using personalized search, we do look at past clicks to change your ranking. So if you clicked on efreedom in the past, that could affect your ranking. You can add "&pws=0" (or use incognito mode in Chrome without logging in) to turn off personalized search and see whether that's the factor for you.

If I'm clicking around to crappy sites to figure out why they rank highly I don't really want them to get even higher in my personal search ranking!

Is deleting them from search history enough to correct this effect?

Adding &pws=0 turned the personalized search off and hence got rid of the efreedom.

Also, I cleared my web history and searched again. The results are same now signed in or signed out. Problem solved! :)

Thanks!

Glad to hear it. &pws=0 is handy to diagnose whether personalized search is causing something to rank higher for you.

It's fairly trivial to add a custom search engine to chrome or ff that automatically appends

In Chrome, do this by adding an engine with the following URL, and make it default if you want:

  {google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&pws=0&q=%s

Wow, you learn a lot around here if you're paying attention! I often wondered whether or not my results were being personalized. Good to know.

Google has been doing this for some time now.

The two links show the same results for me now (logged in). Perhaps the index/algorithm changes just took a while to be deployed to all servers.

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