Google’s latest innovation in personal search means all change for users as the search giant mixes up results on an individual basis.
In the last few days Google has announced a major shift in the technology it uses to display web search results. On Friday, Google announced ”personalised search for everyone” – a concept that means no two users should see exactly the same results.
"The default behaviour is for personalisation to be switched on, however a link is provided on the Google Homepage to disable it:
Google already personalises results, having done so for some time for users logged in to services such as Gmail, AdWords and Blogger without any major outcry, so it’s hardly likely to create a huge disturbance.
Google says about the update:
"This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser."
…and provides this exampe:
"Since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes."
One suspects that, given the approach of promoting content from sites you visit regularly, the impact will be an increase in re-visits for sites with sticky content and loyal visitors, rather than speculative sites with high unique visitor counts and few repeat visits, as well as reduce visits to sites containing low quality content (aka spam).
Recent moves into geo positioning are echoed in the description of personalization in the Google help centre
"We try to use information about your location to customize your search results if there’s a reason to believe it’ll be helpful (for example, if you search for a restaurant chain, you may want to find the one near you)."
And in terms of privacy, the help centre explains:
"Because many people might search from a single computer, the browser cookie may be associated with more than one person’s search activity. For this reason, we do not provide a method for viewing this signed-out search activity."
Given that we can choose to opt out of personalisation, or choose not to accept cookies, this doesn’t eliminate ranking as some are touting, since the underlying rankings which drive personalisation will remain largely unaffected.
That said, we will definitely be keeping our eyes on the data in the weeks and months to come for any trends that arise as a result of this update.
Tags: Google, personalised search