Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even Logged Out)

Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/ , has been getting more and more borked and broken over the past year, and especially over the past few days.

As it is, Google has been rewriting search result links so that they redirect through Google before forwarding to the final destination. It causes a noticeable delay, never mind the privacy implications. I've disabled this through a Greasemonkey script called googlePrivacy.

Now (as of today, on Firefox), they have fiddled with their home page, so that it gradually "fades in" when you mouse over it. Unfortunately, the googlePrivacy script interacts poorly with this, effectively disabling the fading in - leaving you with a very bare Google home page.

Also new behaviour, google.com keeps redirecting to google.co.uk, so much so that I've had to change my Google shortcut to http://www.google.com/ncr and install a Google US country-specific search provider, since Google's new behaviour essentially broke Firefox's built-in Google search provider. They also lost my search settings (in particular, I prefer 100 results per page).

Some, or many, of my problems may be caused by poor interaction with googlePrivacy, but the old ways worked, goddammit, and I am irked that I am unilaterally being frog-marched to a new version of client-side Google that I never asked for and don't want.

I need 'personalized' search results like I need a hole in the head. I use search a lot and I personalize it by using the search skills I've acquired. I don't need some unknown algorithm making unsubtle decisions. Making this opt-out is a PITA ... but it's their sandbox ...

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature... this will soon be a bit too real =)

It seems I had had the history enabled, at least partially.

I looked at my history and it's pretty fucking scary. Even for myself. And I don't mean porn sites or anything, it's just that pretty much anything I had thought in the last few days was there, nicely listed and visible should I choose to return to those thoughts.

I cleared the whole history and Google said it also made the history paused for me until I manually resume it. I'm glad it offered that option by default.

But I still suspect they're there somewhere.

I don't understand why this is so bad. Google's trying to make sure you get more relevant results. If you already know what you want to find, you don't need a search engine.

If you don't like it, like me, it is simple; use an anonymous proxy. Or use google scraper: http://www.scroogle.org/

The kitty is sort of out of the bag with the original page rank algorithm, right? I mean wasn't it partially funded by the government. I don't see why a free and open sourced search engine can't emerge to compete with Google on pure search. Now that they are a public corporation, there will be a relentless drive toward growth, to the detriment of most of their casual customers.