Personalisation is an inherent part of many of the search engines’ offerings, with Google first introducing the concept in 2004, allowing users to specify their interests to gain a more customised set of results. Yahoo! followed suit in March, 2005 with Yahoo! 360° which is a customised search service as well as a social networking site offering features such as blogs, photo and music sharing.
With Google search becoming personalised across the board for all logged in users there is some controversy regarding user privacy. This is mainly due to the ever growing search engine empires, that now encompass marketing agencies which could potentially use search data to aid their own behaviourally targeted campaigns.
Although these concerns are well founded, the pros of personalised search results are evident as users are offered a much more bespoke and relevant service. Personalised search helps reduce irrelevant information, improves the search engine’s interpretation of query intent and improves user satisfaction.
To give a little background, the earliest form of search personalisation was geo-targeting, where the information about the user’s location could be used to deliver more relevant results. Now search engines have access to many other pieces of information about their users, and use this to provide more focused results. User behaviour is measured more closely with search engines monitoring the search results users click on. This is likely to be used to determine future search results. Users are also encouraged to use search engine toolbars, which report back behaviour patterns to the engines and give implicit data on page popularity.
More recently sub-engines, such as Trexy and younanimous utilise the intersection of individual search patterns to predict best fit results. The advent of Web 2.0 saw a huge boom in user interaction and associated search repercussions.
With the increasing trends towards personalisation, traditional methods of optimising websites to perform highly in search engines will have to be adapted, as results begin to reflect individual user preference rather than the generic output of a search engine’s algorithm. Search professionals will have to work even more closely with above-the-line marketing to target users’ search behaviour more effectively. SEO agencies will need to tailor their keyword campaigns with marketing straplines and the popular buzz subjects that are discussed online as well as more traditional search terms. SEO agencies will need to work in collaboration with web designers to make the sites they work with ‘sticky’, i.e. popular with users – sites that will inspire frequent visits and searches. SEO will no longer be the responsibility of only the IT department but also the responsibility of marketing, PR and corporate affairs to ensure brand management online through SEO and search marketing is as effective as possible.
While the advent of personalised search will require a number of new approaches, it is important to remember that these are combined with, rather than replacing, the more traditional methods by which the ranking of sites is improved. Ensuring that search engines spiders can navigate your site is and will remain the fundamental first step that sites require to be listed in search engines. If a search engine cannot find your pages in the first place, then they will not be listed.
Tags: personalised search