06 Dec Google Likely Monitoring Logged Out Users for Search Personalization, DuckDuckGo Study Says
A recent study by privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo revealed that Google is still personalizing search results even if users are not logged into their Google accounts or using Chrome’s Incognito mode.
Conducted earlier in June at the height of the US midterm election, DuckDuckGo found that majority of their study participants saw different results when searching three divisive terms: “gun control,” “immigration,” and “vaccinations.” The search firm said that the discrepancies could not be explained by changes in location, time, by being logged in to Google, or by Google testing algorithm changes to a small subset of users.
Meanwhile, Google said that search results can change by the minute, even by the second, especially for news topics. Additionally, only a small fraction of the total number of queries entered into search is personalized, and relying on recent queries is often done to determine the context for a search, like when a word may apply to a sports team and a city simultaneously.
Source: The Verge
