How to Turn Off Personalized Search in Google Chrome

By Michael Gray on August 2009

With the impending arrival of Google OS I’ve been spending more time in Google Chrome, and figuring out how to customize things to my liking. Here’s a tip on how to turn off personalized search in Google Chrome.

First thing you want to do is click the wrench icon on the Google Chrome toolbar and select options, when the dialog box pops up, select the manage button next to search engine listings

When the list of search engine pops up choose Google, you’ll see there are three values listed the third one is the one you’re concerned with copy and paste it to your favorite text editor

You should have a text line that looks like this

{google:baseURL}search{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion} sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

That’s the code that google uses to form your search query. To turn off personalized search you need to add the following parameter on to the end

&pws=0

close one dialog box and click “add” a new box will pop up, name your new search engine differently than any of the others (the checkbox will turn green when you do) and paste the code with the [&pws=0] on the end into the bottom box

I prefer all of my searches to be non personalized so I made it my default, but that’s up to you. Execute a search and check for the [&pws=0] parameter and you’re good to go.

photo credit: extranoise

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