Nilhan Jayasinghe

A few days ago Google made another big change to regular search results. All search results are now personalised by default. From now, we’ll see different results for the same query based on our web history. A lot of people have been getting these results when they’ve been logged into a Google account, but from now, all results are personalised regardless of login.

Over at search engine land Danny Sullivan is calling this the most significant changes to organic search. I’m still torn between this, the Vince update, social and real-time search being talked about and labbed.

This was something we all thought would happen once Google had enough data to be confident of providing a better user experience though personalisation most of the time, and look like that day is here.

There are plenty of arguments against personalisation by default – Danny points out the lack of disclosure to users. For me this highlights a much greater issue around the need for search engines to be more open about how they determine results. I’m not talking about giving away the crown jewels, but users need to know more about how information is being filtered for them.

Another area of worry surround the rich get richer scheme promoted by personalisation, with newer sites finding it even harder to break into results. I’m not sure this is any different to using links for rankings. Or in fact any other measure of popularity.

Google has stated that personalisation is not going to be so dramatic as to prevent variation in results. I’m curious as to how this may be solved once we move to greater personalisation beyond a few sites being effected for a few queries.

I think we need to look at all the other changes that have been taking place this year to put this into context. I suspect buzz data will provide the additional signals for freshness, and the social graph has the potential to make things even more personal.

Google’s recently made deals with Twitter and more recently MySpace, and while these may not be as big as Facebook, convergence of this data is inevitable.

I was a big fan of the Vince update, and I feel the same about personalisation. Many in the SEO business will worry about loss of traffic as only a fraction of people will see your results and you’ll find it even harder to get a site ranking with traditional techniques. But the traffic you get will be much more targeted.

Understanding your audience will be critical. Focus on the right user and all else will follow.

We’re just starting to see some of the biggest changes in search. Roll on 2010.

There’s been a lot of talk about Google favouring brands in search results. For me this is not new, they’ve always tried to do this. They just got better at aligning search results with public opinion as oppose to SEO’d opinion. General search results have always been about ‘trying‘ to rank the brands for commercial queries. This makes sense as Brands are defined by public perception – we expect to see them.

The issue for Google has been the way it tried to identify those brands. Essentially the Google algorithm relied almost entirely on the published web to define relevance and credibility/reputation. This was easy to manipulate and doesn’t always represent relevance defined by the searcher. My favourite search query for ‘table’ is a good example of this misalignment.

With this new update still to roll out for Google UK, I’m seeing more brands ranking for terms they are not specifically optimised for.

Now for the pseudo science bit -

Searching for ‘flights’ British Airways are now in the top 10 from a previous position outside the top 30.

Searching on a pure anchor text search using ‘allinanchor:flights’ they are still outside the top 30. But on a synonymous search using ‘~flights’ they are in the top 10.

So BA has been identified as
The tilde (~) query returns results based on not just the pages matching the exact query words but those that are synonyms of the query words using something similar to Latent Semantic Analysis. I say something similar because we are seeing something more than just statistical analysis of on-page content. If this was the case, we’d be seeing BMW ranking for ‘car’ (we still may).

Looks to me like user data is being incorporated to identify those instances where the synonym matches searcher expectation.

Note ‘BA flights’ in the related queries section at the bottom of the result page for ‘flights’.

So we may be seeing brands that haven’t bothered to optimise for searches gaining a few positions for core terms. Though this is all a bit hit and miss and is no substitute for proper keyword analysis and content optimisation. At least not yet.