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Comment by bhavin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

Google has been doing this for some time now.

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