Google pushing personalised search
Last week Google made a significant change to the personalised search experience, which should increase the use of the service, and has the SEO community concerned about the impact on the service they offer their clients.
Personalised search is nothing new and have been around for several years, but the recent announcement by Google to personalise results by default for anyone logged into a Google service like Gmail is a bold move. Leaving the privacy issue to one side (thought to be a big reason for why the masses didn’t opt for personalised results so far), there’re a few other things worth noting.
Google personalised refines results based on search behaviour, but a user had to login to their personalised Google to get the biased results. When they did, the results factored-in their previous search behaviour to refine context and disambiguate the query.
Personally, being an SEO, I preferred my results to be generic – and I was never sure about the consequences of me constantly Googling, and only clicking through to the sites of competitors. I figured Google would assume that I found my competitor sites to be more relevant than my client sites.
So, what’s changed? Well, like me, if you’re logged into Gmail, Gtalk, Google reader or any one of the other Google services, then your results are automatically personalised. As more people opt in for Googlge services, especially with the announcement that Gmail is to go public, a much greater proportion of searches are goint to receive personalised results.
The other important change is the use of your Google personalised home page as a signal of context, as well as the sites you store in your Google bookmarks.
These are quite major changes, which should provide greater relevance. This also makes it very difficult for Spam to influence results.
So, why is the SEO community worried? SEO services are often sold on the basis of improving rankings for agreed search terms that are judged to deliver the most valuable traffic. Payment is based on showing clients the positions achieved on a given list of search terms.
With personalised search, results are going to vary from person to person. The SEO sees one result (May be a non personalised result), the client sees another, and each of their customers see completely different results. You can see how this is going to cause many disagreements. So, judging success by rankings may be on its way out (Never a favourite of mine). But is SEO less effective when results are personalised?
Personally, I don’t think so and I strongly believe that those marketing companies attempting to deliver good products and services to people who want them, when they want them, are going to find it easier than ever. People still need to discover new products, services and information and satisfying that has always been the core principal behind SEO
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I have observed with some interest variability of natural search results when using computers of different people logged to their Google accounts. While interesting, it can also be a complex issue to address by SEO/SEM firms. The problem will get more complex when free bespoke search gets the attention of a larger number of people. In this light, I started playing with Google co-op in order to develop my own search engine. It is still Google, but I want to see to what extent I can filter out certain search results -China-style search but in a tiny scale. I got nosy and went on a little stroll along your blog, but I could not find anything about it. Please let me know when you write something about Google co-op and/or similar services.