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A comment on Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds. Parent comment

Re:Google personalizes search results even when you’re logge... by klodolph on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @05:31PM (#18604163)
You can try putting double-quotes around the model number. This is Google’s syntax for exact matches. For a good example, try searching for NYC both with and without quotes around it. Without quotes, you will get a much larger set of results where Google is trying to figure out what you mean when you say NYC… including results for New York City.

This doesn’t always work exactly but in general if you are looking for exact matches for certain terms, put those terms in quotes.

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Re:Google personalizes search results even when you’re logge... by iamnothere on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:34PM (#18605075)
Double quotes keep getting less and less effective -- Google is progressively ignoring them more often when similar results are available. Worse, I've seen Google tell me that a term in double quotes simply doesn't exist on the web, when other engines will return many thousands of results. I seriously doubt that the competition has a bigger index!

This is what finally put me on using DDG.

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Re:Google personalizes search results even when you’re logge... by mda on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @02:22AM (#18606302)
So DDG aka (bing / yandex) is better for double quotes.. maybe, but it could also be just an illusion, try same queries there and see.
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Re:Google personalizes search results even when you’re logge... by iamnothere on Thursday December 06, 2018 @08:22AM (#18617757)
I have, that's actually why I switched. I was getting better results with DDG.

I think what I've noticed with technical searches is that Google tries too hard to "predict" what I am looking for. It always ends up showing me irrelevant (but surely highly ranked) fluff related to prior searches. The thing is, I don't need to see something related to my prior searches. I need to see what I am looking for TODAY. For me the "personalization" is often actively harmful.

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