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Google defaults on personalisation

Posted by Simon Howland December 8th, 2009

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

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SearchWiki – part of the Google Search Algorithm?

Posted by Manley December 8th, 2008

SearchWiki is being spammed a lot – is this spam just for the minority of users who actually view SearchWiki comments or is there an SEO golden goose to be found in Google’s foray into social search?

Before you get too excited about this, let me start off by summarising things:

Spamming SearchWiki is not going to help your rankings.

To be brutally frank, there is not much more to say on the matter either. I covered SearchWiki in relative detail back when it was first launched and nothing much has changed since then, except for the spam.

There are plenty of examples available – do a simple search for[

As an aside, I do not personally use Google whilst logged in as a rule, so I looked at a few different search terms whilst preparing this post. My favourites include TechCrunch’s porn spam and a smaller search agency who simply had the comment: "a company that we have used pervioulsy". Possibly one of the least telling recommendations of all time, unless the typo was deliberate?

Tags: Google, personalised search

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SearchWiki

Posted by Manley November 24th, 2008

Google has launched human editable social personalised search for logged in users, under the name SearchWiki.

What does this mean for organic search?

Google has launched SearchWiki, which allows Google account holders to adjust their personal search results by moving them around the page, adding new results and deleting inappropriate ones. The user can also add comments about the sites that they are interested in, which can then be read by any logged in user.

These tailored results will appear each time that particular search is performed and, although the customisations only affect the account users results page, they can be shared with other members of the community.

I ran a Google search for our Linkscape™ product and the results looked like this:

The three major points are the little arrows and crosses on the right of each title, and the small quote bubbles at the end of each snippet.

Let’s try clicking an arrow. I think that, for the purposes of this experiment, I have noticed that seomoz seem to have chosen to call their similar tool the same name, so I will move its page up a little so that I can keep an eye on it, so I click the arrow to the right of the title:

So, I get a little green arrow to remind me why this page is ranking unnaturally higher than it should. I am also told that I am the first person to pick this result and would also be able to see how many people had promoted or deleted this result, had they done so. The little x has also changed to a down arrow which I click, returning the SERPs to how they were before.

Now I delete the same result by clicking on the little x. I get a rather nice ‘puff of smoke’ animation and the result simply vanishes. This can then be retrieved at will from the bottom of the page where it is hiding behind some AJAX:

And then I easily restore the result as well. This screenshot also shows the Add a Result option and other SearchWiki links. And that’s about it.

The first question that presents itself is why? Why would Google introduce an explicit human element to an algorithm which already uses implicit data collection to personalise the results for all logged in users? The main thrust of Google’s business model has been that its algorithm can interpret user behaviour better than those users can themselves and, frankly, there is little to suggest that they were wrong – the Google results are relevant, intelligent and personalised by users’ actual behaviour. Why now switch to a more social tagging model?

There are two possibilities here. One is that Google is attempting to incorporate the social buzz into its offering in order to stay in line with current social trends. The Wiki part of SearchWiki might suggest this – any logged in user can share comments and recommendations for any result. Yahoo!’s recent performance and the quality of Google’s results suggest that this is unlikely to be a direction in which they are moving. Why allow users to affect relevant results with proactive promotion when they already feed massive amounts of data back through passive search activity?

The second possibility is that Google want this active data. I can only guess at what Google believes that it will offer beyond what its current, passively gleaned implicit data already does. Spam detection, removal of adult sites when safe search is enabled, a reduction in malware sites and a good feel of the social zeitgeist are unlikely to be able to match the power of the data they already have and, as yet, Google has been very reticent in response to questions about the possibility of including SearchWiki in the feedback loop for the main results. We have started a rather simplistic test for this – a page with no links to it at all will be added to a set of SearchWiki personalised results and, if it appears in the main results pages, we will know that Google is looping this data back in.

So this could simply be lip service to the social ideal which still holds that explicit human interaction is more powerful than implicit data gathering, a guard against competition from Wikia (why?) or just adding a rather obscure link to see other’s comments because someone wrote it in their 20% time and it works, but what effect will it have on search?

Firstly it will be a small disaster for search agencies. This week every man and his dog will be playing with their personalised results and, by the time we crawl out of bed on Thursday morning, every CEO on the planet will be calling their search agency in a delighted manner, since their site has jumped 15 positions. Spammers will be hiring huge swathes of students to rank SERPs on specific searches and Google will have a massive amount of data identifying SEOs and the sites which they are promoting.

After a week or so, the reliance of clients on reporting will probably increase, with rank reporting tools become increasingly valuable as internal users artificially inflate their own results. Some users will like the new full-on re-ordering of results. More will discover the, already existing, ‘remove irrelevant results’ feature. Most will see how personalisation is working for them, where they might not have noticed it before.

In the long term? A few hardened geeks will continue to use the SearchWiki and a lot of people will have permanently inflated opinions of their own positions for certain vanity searches, but the search results are unlikely to be majorly affected. Yes, Google may use our actions to subtly change rankings, but the key word here is subtle. Humans are not the new PageRank and we never should be.

Tags: Google, personalised search

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Personalisation of Search

Posted by Manley October 1st, 2007

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

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