That's fine. I used poor wording. By gathering more information about me, and making more guesses about what I want, Google is making a stronger bubble. Sometimes they guess well. Sometimes they guess really badly.

For many people this is great and exactly what they want. Sometimes it's what I want; sometimes Google's stemming or synonyms gets me a result that I would have struggled to find.

But, sometimes, I want Google to search for the words I enter. I want Google to return the same results to me as it does to Bob and Ann (if they're both in my country).

I don't care that [roses] gives me a different result to [roses roses roses]; I do care that Ann gets a different result for [roses] than Bob does. I can't explain why I care, and I'm happy to accept that I'm wrong. (For example, hopefully once people pick up that Google serves different results they'll stop saying Just Google It, which is good advice but sucks if you've Googled it and found only three forum posts with people being told to just Google it.)

I guess a lot of this is age and weariness. I remember a time when a Google search result would be an opportunity for serendipity to point me towards great sources of information. Some person, an expert, had a little plain html page with a few diagrams and a lot of text and I'd have to work to understand it. Now? Not so much. I get a lot of content farms (But I'm really grateful to Google for tweaking those down, and allowing me to block content from certain domains) or flash heavy brand sites (See especially photographers and watch manufacturers.) or a narrow band of not fun sites.

> I want Google to return the same results to me as it does to Bob and Ann (if they're both in my country).

I do plenty of international travel and, until I figured out how to control the country-level Google I got, I violently hated this.

It sounds to me like you want Google to implement exactly the level of personalization you want, no more and no less. I don't think that's reasonable. What I do think is reasonable asking Google to give you the tools required to control the level of personalization you get. For the most part, I think they do that (though I'm sure there are more than a few rough edges at this point).

>Sometimes they guess well. Sometimes they guess really badly.

How do you know this will happen? They haven't turned their new algorithm on yet. You're claiming an idea hasn't worked in the past, but the idea has never been tried before.

The reason they're changing their search results is because their search results are starting to suck more. They're trying to fix your complaint. Want the same shitty search full of SEO spam? Sign out. Otherwise you're just bitching.

>(But I'm really grateful to Google for tweaking those down, and allowing me to block content from certain domains)

THIS IS WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO DO. If you don't like content farms chances are no one else does either. And yet you complain.