Google Personalized Search
I was searching through my logs today saw a referrer link that brought a visitor to my page from Google. The interesting thing was when I clicked on the link to go to the Google search, I noticed a big yellow banner at the top, alerting me to the fact that Google is now providing a more personalized search.
New! Google finds the search results most relevant to you, based on your search history. Learn more.
This was news to me, but apparently it’s not that new at all. A quick search on “google personalized search” yields some detailed articles:
- http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050628-073541
- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/search-gets-personal.html
Ok, so the Google blog made it clear that this is still a Beta project. If you have a Google Account, you can try out the personalized search here:
This is a fantastic development for people doing searches but could really shake up the SEO industry (which is not necessarily a bad thing). If a large majority of users were to use the personalized search it would be incredibly difficult for SEO software to monitor the ranking of web sites, as it would be so hard to assess the impact the personalization is having on the SERPs and their content.
The great thing is this would force people to write more useful articles and produce better websites. Publishers would no longer focus on optimizing keywords and other SEO tricks.