Skewed results in Google

[blitzna10]

Im just curious.. Im sure a lot of you, like me, Google your own search terms on a fairly frequent basis.

Does doing this skew the result you are actually seeing? As in, does Google tailor the results more to my liking, and therefore perhaps show my own site (which I would click through to often enough) higher on the page that it actually is?

Sometimes I swear that happens.

Steve.

[LesleyPaone]

Yes totally. They are tailored by geographic location and by what they think your preference is. The best bet is using a different browserr with your ip address if you are trying for local. If you are trying to gauge nationally, you might try several browsers and vpn's to get a good handle.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Yes, this is called Google Personalized Search - you can learn more about it from this great Whiteboard Friday.

If you want to get a more beneficial look at your rankings, I would suggest checking out Startpage or taking a look at your average position in Webmaster Tools - it's a more aggregated ranking metric in WMT as it combines multiple factors and averages your positions for that keyword/query. Also, Moz tracks keywords for you and updates you weekly.

Hope this helps! Good luck!