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How to turn off Google Search plus Your World

Search plus Your World delivers personal search results from Google+ and Picasa to searches on Google.com, but if such information is just clutter to your eyes, you can turn it off for a particular search or disable it altogether.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott

Maybe it's because I signed up for Google+ out of professional curiosity and have not returned to it after the first couple of weeks I signed up and made a few G+ friends and circles, but I have found little to no use for Google's new Search plus Your World feature. It delivers personal search results from the friends you follow on Google+ and Picasa. Thankfully, it's easy to remove these results for a particular search or disable the feature for all searches.

The show (person icon) and hide (globe icon) buttons let you toggle personal search results on and off. Screenshot by Matt Elliott

At the top of some search results pages, Search plus Your World adds a link for a number of "personal results." To the right, you'll see two buttons to show or hide personal results. Click on the button with the globe icon to hide results.

Choose Search settings to disable Search plus Your World results for all searches. Screenshot by Matt Elliott

To disable the Search plus Your World feature altogether, click on the gear-icon button in the upper-right corner of a search results page and choose Search settings. On the next page, scroll down to the Personal results header and click the dot for "Do not use personal results." Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit the blue Save button.

After selecting Do not use personal results don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page to save your preference. Screenshot by Matt Elliott

(Via Mashable)