Depersonalising Google Search Results Bookmarklet

Posted by james on Jun 14, 2007 in google | 3 comments

This is probably not original.

This is probably not exciting.

But it’s something I’ve been looking for for a while, and here it is…

The route this piece of info took to get here was quite convoluted:

Danny Sullivan spoke about it on the Daily SearchCast…
… because Barry Schwartz wrote about it at Search Engine Land – “Easy Way To Turn Off Google Personalized Results“…
… because Aaron Wall wrote about it on his blog at SEOBook.com – “How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out”

Anyway, after following the breadcrumb trail to ensure everybody got their credit, I decided to make the bookmarklet that I’ve always needed:

GdePWS

Sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it. At the very least, it sounds Dutch. It stands for “Google de-Personalise Web Search”.

To use it, just drag the link onto your FireFox bookmarks toolbar. Then, once you’ve performed a search in Google, if you’d like to see what the results look like without Google dishing out personalised search results, just click the link. It will perform the search again, only with the “&pws=0″ parameter appended to the end.

Let me know what you think.