Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Fixing Google with Adblock Plus

TechCrunch is right – Google, It Wasn’t Broke.  Google has rolled personalization at the item level into search, cluttering their elegant interface.  As far as I can tell, this affects all users who are logged in with a Google account (i.e. Gmail, etc), and there’s no way to opt out.  Now, I’m not against personalization – if you want it.  And while it appears there’s no way to opt out, you can make the cluttering icons disappear with Adblock plus (Firefox users).  To make the buttons and conversation icon disappear, add the following “element hiding rules” to Adblock Plus:

google.com#BUTTON(class=wci)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w10)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w20)

Voila, Google back to normal.

Update: TechCrunch reports that Google may be rolling this feature back, and it reports on a Greasemonkey script that accomplishes the same results as this Adblock Plus filter.  I’m not a Greasemonkey user so I’m not able to verify.

You could also have a second browser open where you’re not logged into Google.

Personally, I don’t find the search personalization bothersome at all. Just as their ads have become practically invisible to me, so will those buttons.

Yes, that’s true. But switching between browsers doesn’t fit into my regular workflow.

And I agree – I’m not against personalization, I just don’t like the icons that are cluttering up the results. Just a personal preference. Thinking about it, however, if they had used text links instead of icons, I probably wouldn’t mind as much.

I’ve got nothing against the feature, but I’m thinking about using Stylish and a little CSS to move the delete and promote buttons down to the last line next to the comments button.

Thanks for the quick and easy fix. That worked like a charm. My main reason for disabling it is also for bringing back the ultra clean interface.