Several months ago, I was chatting with a pretty senior level Googler who works on search and I brought up personalized search and he made it sound to me that it is really barely anything there with personalized search. What does matter is your location and language in terms of personalization but your search history and what information Google has about your likes, dislikes and demographics is not really used to make the search results better for you.
Danny Sullivan of Google has just posted officially about this on Twitter saying "personalization of results is very light." "Most people searching in the same language and same location will see largely the same things," he added.
He also mentioned that "location and language are far more influential about why results differ," as I mentioned above.
Here is Danny's tweet:
FYI, personalization of results is very light. Most people searching in the same language and same location will see largely the same things. Location and language are far more influential about why results differ.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 15, 2018
We've covered personalized search here a lot and back in the day, like five or so years ago, Google made a big deal of it. But you don't hear much from Google about it these days, outside of geo/lingual reasons.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Here are even more comments from Danny on personalization in Google search:
Just wanted to clarify that tweets are not personalized. If you see differences between people, that's down to the real-time nature of them. It's not due to any personalization.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 23, 2018
Our personalization of results is far, far less than commonly assumed, so it's not surprising.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 21, 2018
