Terrific review of Google Search 2007 - power user techniques

I hadn't realized how much personalization of search results Google does now. No wonder I can find my own blog material so easily!

Biases and Restrictions in Google Search:

...5. If you don't like Google's personalized results you can log out from your Google account, disable the Web History service or turn off the personalization bias by adding &pws=0 to Google's URL. Note that the parameter is not persistent and it only works for the current search.

6. To restrict your search to the high-quality (?) web sites included in the Open Directory Project, you can append &cat=gwd/Top to Google's URL or perform your search at Google Directory...

There's lots more. It's definitely worth studying this and keeping a link to the reference.

I tried the &pws=0 parameter when searching for my own stuff, and it was neat to see the search results change. It wasn't a large change, but in general my stuff moved down the main page one step.