What Personalized Search Really Means
- Posted by Badi Jones on June 26th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »
If you ask someone at Google why they implemented personalized search, I’m sure they would explain how it helps to improve the quality of search for the users. Well, that might be true for some, but my reaction so far to personalized search has been somewhere between skeptical, and slightly annoyed.
Well, today I added “creeped out” to that list. I feel like I have seen first hand the real face of Google’s personalized search. Not the one that wants to help me, but the one that wants to record my search history, and try to squeeze even more money by using my personal habits.
Today I did a quick search for ‘hardwood floors‘. My wife and I just bought our first home (thank you very much 
), and I wanted to compare the prices at our Home Improvement store to some prices online. Not a big deal. I found what I was looking for (Thanks Old Google) and then I went about my business.
A little later on, I went to Digg.com, and was browsing through the stories, and I just couldn’t help but to notice the Google ad that kept showing up at the top of the page.
Ads for hardwood floors. It’s clever, but creepy. All I can think about is that movie the Minority Report.
In all seriousness, I don’t really think this is all that scary, but what bothers me about the whole thing is that Google wants people to believe that they are really trying to improve the quality of their search by doing this. I don’t know about you, but I have found that the quality of search has actually decreased, and it’s harder for me to find things that I’m looking for. I’ve even been able to find things on Yahoo that I couldn’t find with Google recently (blasphemy 
).
Google wants to make money, and that’s fine. All I’m saying is, they should put search first, and worry about making money after that, otherwise, they’re going to start loosing users.
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3 Responses to “What Personalized Search Really Means”
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June 27th, 2007 at 5:02 am
I just wonder how it affects on seo’s companys. If the search will be personalized how they are going to improve their clients site ranking.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
If most of the Google users would be seeing nothing else but personalized search results, that would indeed force a revolution in SEO-land.
Building great websites for visitors will be even more important than nowadays, because SEO-techniques are no longer success-guaranteed.
Google not only trying to match websites to a search query but also trying to find websites that fit a specific person means SEO would require more in-depth optimizing. You cannot say “I will do this and that and soon you will rank first page for keyword x” anymore. It all becomes part of the broader plan.
Google showing ads that match recent search queries doesn’t sound creepy to me, they’re just being smart.
I’m just wandering what this means for Adsense-CPC, as this is partly based on page relevancy.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Here’s the big problem. Who is protecting all that data? Sure tthe big G is for commerce reasons but at the end of the day there’s a ton of data being mined about people. Worst thing is that the average net user does not even know it happening.