When you do a search on Google (especially if you are logged in but also, I think, if you have visited previously and have a cookie installed) you get custom results. So, for instance, if you search on “Chicago Divorce Lawyer” once and then do it again, later, your second set of results are influenced by what happened on the first visit. If you clicked on a certain site then you are more likely to see that site elevated in the results of the second search. Apparently this is done to enhance your search experience and it’s probably a helpful feature.
The problem is that you don’t see the same results as other people see and this becomes a concern when you are checking out your site’s performance in the search engine rankings. Most of us would like our site to come up first on certain search phrases and we’d like to know how we are doing. The Google customized results make it difficult for you to check.
I use an expensive and complicated software package for checking my rankings but I really like to check every so often without launching the software and clicking on all the buttons. I just want to do a quick search and see what the rest of the world is seeing.
Scroogle.org will search google for you via a proxy. With Scroogle you are anonymous to Google. They don’t know it’s you.
P.S. Be careful not to go to Scroogle.com (as distinguished from .org) unless you enjoy lesbian pornography.
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Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 
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I can’t figure out how to set my google default to scroogle default. How do I do that?
Besides scroogle.org, another way to protect yourself from Google’s data gathering and profile building is by using Firefox with the extension “CustomizeGoogle” installed. It is equipped with privacy features you can turn on in the options, such as preventing Google Analytics from gathering information and scrambling your Google ID.
Another worthwhile extension is “TrackMeNot” which automatically sends fake queries to all the major search engines, without you having to do anything, thus scrambling the data profile that the engines are building on you even further.
By the way, there is no reason why you can’t combine the use of the scroogle.org and plugins such as CustomizeGoogle and TrackMeNot; they obviously will never interfere with each other, and combined they provide multiple layers of protection.
Hey
Thanks for the info. We need more of this type of information publicized so that others know there are options. thanks
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