On December 4, 2009, Google announced that they were rolling out personalized search to everyone, whether you are logged in or not. Your personalization will be based on your past 180 days of search activity, using information stored in an anonymous browser cookie.

Have you noticed personalization yet? If you are unsure, here’s how you can tell if your results are personalized or not. Note: Not all results are personalized.

I ran a Google search for “cars," and directly above the search results there is a link that says “View customizations.” This tells you that the results you are seeing are personalized. So far, I have only noticed the personalization on broad searches.

There are a couple ways to turn off personalization:
1. You can click on the “Web History” link and then click the “Disable customizations” link in the next window.
2. You can clear your browser’s cookies. However, if you have disabled customizations you will need to disable it again after clearing your cookies. Clearing your cookies turns on history-based customizations.

In my search for “cars,” I compared the personalized search results to non-personalized search results. The first 10 results were exactly the same regardless of whether they were personalized or not.

Is this the case for you, or are you seeing more variation in your search results?