Personalized Search: I like it

Personalized Search. This is what everyone is talking about after the show. Duplicate Content? Nay. Personalized Search is where it’s at right now. Here’s my run down:

Danny Sullivan started with a review of personalized search. Basically, influencers like Google Personalized Home Content (iGoogle), Google Bookmarks, Search History, and Web History all play into what Google knows about you. They then use that to figure out what you like, and what your searches might mean.

For example, a search for ‘dolphins’ might be for the mammal or the football team. Your other searches may give the engine a better idea what you are looking for, serving you better results.

You can opt out of any of this at anytime. And as much as American’s hate being tracked, this is totally opt in. Most people will probably never notice, just think the search engine is just that good.

Yahoo started to do this with Yahoo! MyWeb, but went away to be developed further. Ask MyStuff is in progress as well.

Gord Hotchkiss – Enquiro

• Pre-personalization-everything revolves around the keyword
• Personalization revolves around the user
• Buzz-sites will be an SEO tactic *this could be useful*
• people are going to build sites with content – comparison wizards, content aggregation, research available
• Engines will developing profiling tools to be used by SEO
• Google/Yahoo will purchased social sites

Michael Grey – aka Greywolf

• You don’t need toolbars to gain rankings as some SEOs try to sell you. Can’t dupe people anymore on this, everyone gets the toolbar and can see their site rank REALLY HIGH if they cant to
• With the combination of Data Centers and Personalization – you can’t guarantee anything anymore (I have been staying this since I heard about it)
• PPC is safe aka Google did not do this to create more PPC money but it will happen
• People are addicted; Google is “dumbing down” the user buy not making people do specific searches. The more they trust google, the less they will use other engines.
• Fix it:
  Stop hiding that we are logged in
  be clearer in the results on what is personalized and what isn’t
  make it easy to turn off personalized search
• How to spam personalized search – use social networks

Tim Mayer

• Session based personalization – results based on queries in a session
  problem:(when does the session start and end?)
• Interest based personalization – interests given or searched for
  problem: (people sometime search outside of their interests (amazon marachi)
• Queries are going to get shorter (current average is 2.7)
• SEO Impact- more and better content and results
• Yahoo is investing in social media
  Helping people find and store what they like

Matt Cutts

• The Idea with Personalization: We want to make results better for our user
• Monty Python reference: knights just magically appeared aka personalized search should not be a surprise

Is Personalization the death of SEO? NO (no one raised their hands)

QA

1. Shared computers and personalization
Matt – Google session-izes everything

2. Calling matt out – opting out of personalization maybe unclear
Tim – you could use another search engine

3. Why is the add to my web button on Yahoo so ugly?
Tim – we’ll look into it

4. Will Google co-op be used in personalization?
Matt – I don’t know for sure. Later on down the road things like that and Google Reader will influence personalized search as well.