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Comment by drivebycomment | Hacker News Reader

I just tried "how to use a massage ball" and I don't see any ads, and links seem to be all legit articles, with YouTube video tutorials at the top.

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Google results are tailored on a number of factors such as location, your past searches and whatnot.

The same deal with the ads. Advertiser wouldn't pay for advertising of their product in a region or to a demograph they don't care for.

I'd be more surprised if you did get the same result as parent.

The results are not that different across locations within each country, especially location agnostic queries like the particular example. It would be rather surprising if there's huge difference between locations within US for this particular query.

What can I say...

Anyway, this is how google explains it:

  > Search uses personalization to improve results
  > Personalization is when you get Search results tailored to you based on your activity.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12412910?hl=en

If you actually compare results across different people across many queries, you will notice that they differ relatively little. The fact that search uses personalization doesn't mean it is always personalized or it affects all results always. It affects relatively small number of queries and relatively small number of results, very dependent on the types of queries and types of results.

Location affects a lot more results than personalization, but that is also very query dependent, so certain queries are affected by the location a lot more than others. And the particular example query is one that you can expect very little location variation.

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