There are no “regular results” on Google anymore.

Google search results are always customised to some extent, a study by competing search engine ducksuckgo has reported.

The study involved 131 volunteers conducting the same search from around the US and other countries and sending screenshots of their results.

The users, who weren’t signed into Google, did Google searches for the three chosen politically-themed terms — “abortion,” “gun control,” and “Obama” — and send in screenshots of their search activity to Weinberg and the DuckDuckGo programming team.

The first page of results varied considerably, showing links from sources google knows you’ve shown interest in before, and pushing other sources further down or off the first page. The video below and dontbubble.us explains how this works in more detail.

So what does this mean?

If you want the #1 spot on google, you have to think about who will be doing the searching. Good SEO practice (as demonstrated by the nice people at GDS) has never been more important.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/51181384[/vimeo]

Found on www.etre.com and idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com

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