Gaming search results and privacy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, explaining that Google does not game its search engine to benefit Google.  Think about it for a moment: If you're using Google, it's a good bet that you're also interested in Google's other products; likewise if you use Bing, you're likely interested in using Microsoft's other products; and so on.

Of course, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) suggested it was no mere coincidence that Google products would come up third (as opposed to being the top result)...as if that was evidence that Google was cooking its results.  Why third, why not the top result?  After all, isn't that the goal of search engine optimization (SEO)???

So I thought I'd conduct several different types of searches using Chrome's Incognito browser, and the results were a bit odd to say the least...see below.

First thing you notice is, that Bing returns results that are automatically localized to Seattle, WA.  Google apparently doesn't localize search results for the search term, "news".  So I thought this deserved a closer look.

Turns out when you do any private browser search (Chrome Incognito, Firefox Private Browsing, IE InPrivate Browsing), the pattern is the same: Bing automatically assigns Seattle, WA as the default location, but Google assigns results (on key words that it chooses) to your actual location. I'll ding Bing for defaulting to Seattle, but I'll ding Google even more, for using IP to return localized results, despite end users utilizing private browsers.

How do I know Google's using IP?  Because I connected to a proxy server and  the localized results reflected the proxy server's location.  And I also switched out Google public DNS for IE's preferred list of DNS.

I suspect the browsers themselves could probably obfuscate your IP.  I know sites themselves - Google especially - could ignore your IP if they wanted to.  But this just goes to show, that even if you block cookies, and turn off scripts, any site you visit can find out where you're located, by looking at your IP.