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Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in. This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.
"For example, 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," Google explains in a blog post on the subject. "Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others."
Can you "rank" in Google if everyone has different results? Share your thoughts on this.
What Does This Mean for SEO?
Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.
"Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them," says Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, which offers SEO services. "I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried."
My guess is that all of the same best practices for search engine optimization will apply. What you may have to pay greater focus to is your target audience.
Are you worried? Do you think this is a change that could have a negative impact on your search engine traffic? Tell us what you think.
On the other hand, personalized search could play to the strengths of the horizontal content approach. Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Network and Publisher of WebProNews has an interesting take on the matter. "There is going to be the same number of searches and the same number of clicks to content," he says. "So basically, personalization in search will just be dividing up the traffic pie more."
"This could make people think more about the long tail instead of just focusing on their top key words that they would like to rank for," he adds. "It could also make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords."
Could personalized search directly contribute to an increase in revenue for Google itself? Interesting.
The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.
"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," Google says. "It’s completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You’ll know when we customize results because a ‘View customizations’ link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization."
If you’re worried about privacy, settle down, because Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click "web history" in the top right corner of a search results page, then click "disable customizations." You can also just clear your browser’s cookies.
As a user, do you like the idea of Google personalizing your search results? Discuss here.
On a related note, Google is also rolling out the inclusion of real-time search results on regular search results pages for some queries. These results draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources. This means you have yet another opportunity for visibility, but it also presents a new challenge, as with any other universal search element, it may push organic listings down on the page. Are you glad to finally see some real-time search make its way to Google?
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It seems a bad Idea. the lot of my search clicks lead to pages I don`t want. Spam, irrelevant content etc, now Google is going to think I like them becasue of my clicks. Hot trend searches like “tiger woods” allow lots of malware sites to get top rankins due to the QDF factors, are they going to keep showing up If I click?
Public computers like net cafe, libraries or schools are going to be search bombed with everything pointing to sites that sell little blue pills.
It might be a good idea for some, but it should be opt-in. Naughty Google
I think this is very interesting.. glad to know that Google can suggests us what usually we visit from recent searches..
We say this only in means of getting the correct category listed.
One question though, How many websites are there that will categorize their websites as in?
snow shovels web site, we are in the seasonal section, lol no one.
The web is too Big & complicated for that , and Does not operate like a retail store settings.
One thing is…. With all of the changes in the last 9 months…
Sooner or later, “us” Internet marketing agencies will be sending traffic to other search engines Because the normal computer user cannot understand why they cannot find anything on Google.
Not to bash but, only to have Google remember that there are only so many Non-savvy people that will understand that they need to change their search terms to find their local hardware store!
Google… make it simple, easy, effective, and diversified. S.E.E.D.
laters
Kind of funny if you think of it…
Ok so 90% of searchers NEVER go past page one in a search result. This means they were already getting what they wanted in the top 10. So if this is true (and it is) then who does opt-out personalized search benefit?
In my experience companies only force opt-ins when it is meant to benefit the company as there is usually no benefit to the user. So this move has begun to change my perception of Google as a company. Seems very MS to me.
And here are the rest of my thoughts from an answer on another blog… some about seo some just w general concerns about Gooogle
_________________________________________________________________________
I would be ok with it, if it was an opt-in option, but the fact that it is an opt-out option leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I have concerns on several levels.
First, Eric Schmidt was quoted this week telling people he is not concerned with people’s privacy. Basically don’t put it on the web if you do not want people to see it, except remember with Google, if you use their apps this means items such as emails. Now this is not about the search issue, but if they do not care about privacy, then they do not care about privacy across the board and remember your searches are now associated with you and not anonymous.
Second, companies only make things such as tracking all your searches ID’d by your log-in or computer profile OPT-OUT for their own reasons. Otherwise they would just let you opt-in and these may be reasons we may not know yet. While I have always been a big Google evangelist, they have seemingly become more aggressive of late and I am not comfortable they will remain benevolent if all their current plans come to fruition. (DNS, GPS, Chrome OS (only use their very searchable apps) etc) They will have your online life completely in their data servers. Check Google.com/Dashboard if you want an idea of how much information that is now. Maybe Google today stays benevolent, but maybe Google of the future changes or even worse someone forces them to reveal their data.
Third, I just do not like personalized search. I find it does not help me and makes my results poor. I want to decipher what I need from pure search, not altered search.
And finally … just on an additional note, one of the best ways to tell people about a website is to say .. hey search on “insert kw here” and it is on the page, with personalized search this goes away.
Again, I would be ok with it, IF it were opt-in, but opt-out feels too big brother to me.
Thanks for listening!
Kristine
@Kithen, I could be wrong, but it sounds like this feature will be default, and so someone will need to educate the masses that it even exists and can be disabled if they’d like to protect their privacy
That is correct AND usually why a company does opt-outs, so that most won’t know about it or if they do, how to opt-out.
In this case, you have to opt-out on ALL Browsers you own AND everytime you clear your cookies… I think I am going to see if I can just add a cookie block to my browser because that is just too much work.
My feelings are it wont make a huge difference to SEO’s at this moment in time as our job is to drive new traffic and for the first few searches I imagine goggle will not see the clicks as a pattern, I would imagine. My assumption is that (please do correct if im wrong) Google will only put pages hire in the personalised search results if they are clicked on repeatedly for a particular search
How presumptious it is of Google to decide they know how to customize search results for us. 1st of all it should be a “opt in” service not an “opt out” service. 2nd they may know what I have looked at previously but that is not always what I want now. In fact if a site is important to me I bookmark it like most people do. I do not need Google’s help for that & if the site was not helpful even if I clicked on it more than once I do not want that at the top. Ultimately it is unlikely to be any real help.
This is good for repeat visitors. Like having a bookmark in the biggest Search Engine in the world. My site generates about 30 000 unique visitors per month, 90% coming organically from Google. At least I’ll know that my link will come up in those people’s results again.
This is bad because if my potential visitor clicked on my competitor’s link, I’m left trailing them in future for that visitor (on the other hand, this would make me want to write better descriptions, so the visitor would click my link instead of my competitors). So I think the future lies in SEO’s spending a lot more time on description tags.
This gets ugly when personalized search incorporates realtime results. What happens to the poor static site, the content of which hasn’t changed for 3 years, but got good traffic because of their optimization and keyword selection? They’d be pushed right off the radar, giving way to constantly updated blogs, etc.
I would rather find the information on my own. I would rather have the page which is ranked democratically by the internet as a whole.
I do not feel that this is a good feature. Unless I opt-in to it.
If it is the standard behavior of Google. Then I will have concerns over freedom of selection.
Nice to see that Google is getting a new grip on there ranking for local areas.
Schools ar moveing away from google becouse of unrelivent keywords and or description
I hope this will inprove google and pull them back.
If Google larns what I click on from searches and therefore only top ranks those sites or results so similar to what I have clicked on before then the result focus is way too limited.
If I am researching something then I want a wide range of results that I then filter myself. A lot of good research information comes from a variety of sources.
I am not sure I like this at all.
This is why so many are moving away from Google. Tho it is still a trickle it will gain momentum just as it has with Microsoft IE.
What a lot of people don’t realize is not that people find what they want on the first page is that if they don’t see it on the first page they do a new search with refinements. In other words they go more long tail.
But if you don’t grab the traffic and get the clicks you will sink further and further even if you truly are the most relevant site for a particular search.
So what are you to do? Adwords. This is all about sucking in more revenue for Google. If you can’t get on that first page in organic searches you will have to do it with paid ads. This will drive the price of those clicks up in all areas.
I’ve gone to other search engines and gotten better results now. Google is over engineering this stuff to get revenue.
For SEO it means you have to get on the first page with a killer description for first (or second) time searches. Once a person hits a website more than once or twice Google will bring it to the top for that person.
What Google should be looking at more (and maybe they are with those cookies) is how long I spend on a site. Just because I click on it doesn’t mean I want to ever go there again. So if I go to a site and bounce within seconds, scratch that one from my list.
Thank you so much
that’s a good topic
hope more from you
regrades
I don’t like Google becoming big brother. I just found out that Google has deleted the satellite pics of their houses, but yours and mine are on there.
Then, they deleted the ape woman picture, opening the door to censorship. They have now become publishers rather than a pure search engine.
I just found out that filtering system in Australia blocked anyone finding out about Climategate:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_abc_filters_working_beautifully
The government is trying to pass laws to do the same here in addition to Obama being able to shut down the net whenever he thinks it’s in the country’s interest. After seeing what is happening in Australia, it seems like the country I grew up in is only a walk down memory lane.
Google buys AppJet then pulls down EtherPad because it is a competitor to their new Google Wave. Google is doing damage to real people, their power is being used to harm the public. It’s very sad.
I have to agree with the majority here who seem to say that Google is starting to become Big Brother. It used to be great. It is now impossible to get good natural rankings. Blogs are not the answer either, they are part of the problem. Amazing how much BS is posted on the net to fool the search engines into thinking it is relevant. We are on page 6 or 7 on Google for our main keywords, but page 1 on Bing. I think the internet community should demand rankings moderated by actual users of the internet who don’t mind throwing a red flag on obvious BS>
Hey Google! I hereby call BS!!!!
Google very stupid, whats is book marks for ?
Bad Bad News for everyone.. I would normally say that legislation to regulate is not the best way forward, But I look forward to a day when governments around the world legislate to restrict google’s constant invasion and digitisation of peoples lives without their consent. Street View and google earth (invasion of privacy), Google Books (breach of copyrights), Gmail (crawling emails), Google Docs (access to your info) personalised search (tracking online activities)… what next? will we have google employee’s searching through peoples rubbish to see what we throw out?
GOOGLE CLEARLY HAS NO SELF RESTRAINT… therefore it needs to be imposed on them…
What ever happened to first do no harm, I understand most people call themselves computer literate because the know how to turn on the computer. This latest affront by Google to people in general indicates a bad case of tunnel vision and it seems like the future protrayed Disney’s WALL-E is bound to come through. If you don’t find what you want on the first search, use your brain and expand the search. Just don’t accept what is served up by the all knowing and with Google Earth all seeing GOOGLE.
The problem is that most people do not “use their brains” and therefore will “accept what is served up by the all knowing” That is where the difficulty lies for anyone wanting their site to be found without paying “The Great Eye in the Sky”
Can you “rank” in Google if everyone has different results?
If Google are artificially ranking frequently visited websites higher, then the results for anyone with an interest in monitoring the ranking of their own website will surely be flawed.
I was told by someone from Google that search results are also affected if you happen to be signed into your Google account when checking out search rankings!
Can anyone confirm if this is true?
I believe google said this a few month’s ago themselves on a google forum
somebody in the 80′s had a crystal ball… remember the sci-fi movies? terminator, robocop etc.. the common thread being total corperate/government control of your life.. we are almost there!
if google is allowed to do this and starts collecting this kind of data… imagine the US Government buying up google/getting hold of the data in a couple of years… No American (or anyone else for that matter) would have any privacy.
Research a serious medical condition quite innocently, you could be denied life insurance, medical treatment or Credit the following day until you prove you don’t have the condition you researched.
Govt doesn’t have to buy up Google. They just need to pass a regulation that’s related to Homeland Security or something. It WOULD be nice not to have the think about Big Bro.
when the revolution comes it will be google employees marched into the courtyard first…
When I use search, I’m looking for something I haven’t seen before, not filtered results that show where I’ve already been. I think this will narrow search to a channel of content that a user already knows. Like only watching news broadcasts that express your political beliefs.
From what I understand, its opt-out and controlled by a cookie. I’d rather it was opt-in.
Can you rank??? of course you bloody can’t, not with any consistantancy.
Are Google on a mission to commit commercial suicide? I for one am getting hacked off with their SERP’s as they are now. Top postions are far too often dominated by scam sites, phishing sites and sites with malware trying to download itself onto my computer.
If Google wants to be more relevent it should bloody well clean its SERP’s up a bit and purge the index of scam and spyware sites, Otherwise Google WILL have a relevency issue on it’s hands, when people like myself decide that Google itself is no longer relevent to my internet experience.
Your comment reminds me that when I recommend http://DuckDuckGo.com I need to remember to mention that a major reason I use them is that they clean up their results. Instead of favoring brands and corporations the way Google does they focus on eliminating scam and spyware sites in their results.
Let’s not forget – Google is a commercial project, its goal is make money. Changes made are primarily to improve its profitability not necessrily make it better for us, the users.
Google is not your friend, your church or you family. They act to preserve their own profit margins not to be benevolent, or even fair.
They are a business though, so that really shouldnt be a surprise. Should it!
So do I think this is yet another way of forcing people to use adwords – absolutely!!
The solution: Stop using google. If they lose customers, they lose advertiser, the lose revenue- then they change. If only there was more of an alternative though. That’s the real issue here. Just like Firefox broke the MSIE browser monoploy we need a good (few) choices in search. Which we dont have. Yet.
The fellas at Mountain View are pretty intelligent and they work with information that we don’t know. I, personally can see a lot of faults with what they have been doing lately, in particular with their maps.
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/12/01/google-new-ui-local-listing-ads-what-does-it-mean-for-local/comment-page-1/#comment-447841
Without going off the immediate subject it does look like Google is focusing a lot on micro management by localising their searches. It looks like they are letting us control the search so as to garnish information to what really are the top user sites allowing them to page rank correctly based on usage for a particular key phrase. On saying that, I also heard that Page Ranking is being axed.
My quandarry is that if I launch a new site, no matter how much seo that goes into it, the site will never be found without paid marketing. Paid marketing with Google either via adwords or the maps (currently free but will have to pay for in the future) will obviously be auction based only leaving this option available for companies with big marketing budgets.
I really feel sorry for all those webmasters that supported Google over the last decade because if it wasn’t for these people Google would never have got off the ground. Google has now forgot all about you. Who’s going to buy a website if nobody can find it?
Another point is that Googles minor competitors, such as Yellow Pages – Online, wil be rubbing their hands together with a grin from ear to ear because, in Australia, they are already a household name so people will just go back to using that platform and possibly discover sensis search to find what they want. (Mentioning Yellow Pages and Sensis in the one paragraph just gave me a bad taste in my mouth) From one monopoliser to another (lol).
Have a great Xmas everyone. (Christians)
Have a great festive season everyone. (all other religions)
What a strange world we live in…
Google sucks. If they want more money why don’t they form a new company and leave well enough alone. I’m tired of their charades. I have 2 e-commerce sites, I want to be found all over the US not locally. If I want to check my rankings, it is now useless. They should give options, not be the gatekeeper.
You’re correct- checking rankings will be useless. How can we pull accurate ranking results when everyone has personalized rankings showing?? There is no software in the world that can currently pull those results. WTF??
The sky isn’t falling, folks.
Like some others here, I usually want fresh results and new sites when I google something. Not a bookmark list of places I already use. But Google shooting itself in the foot isn’t anything new. If this goes down the way some people think it will, Google is going to lose users. Period.
I mean, think about it. As a webmaster, I’ll simply start optimizing my content for some other popular search engines and relegate Google to the back burner where they’ve been begging to go for some years now anyway. As a mentor, I’ll be teaching other people to make similar adjustments. The more this starts happening, the more market share Google is going to notice slipping through its dying fingers.
Can I “rank” if Google does this? Who cares? The best webmasters and business will simply adapt, overcome, and start finding other options. I’m telling you: Google WILL be kicking itself.
Some previous visitors or customers may click on there in-search bookmarks. They may have had to dig hard to find your site and not want to go do that again if they forgot to bookmark you in the browser. Makes it easy to find your site again. Good for loyal customers or visitors so they don’t sway elsewhere.
But if what was said about having to now use Adsense to beat out the search users previous visits to another website, then it sounds like Google is getting greedy to try to push you over to PPC, Adsense instead of Organic searches. Sure Google has to make a profit but they forcing us to use Adsense to stay on top, unless a Organic SEO expert finds another way to avoid the money traps.
It may on the other hand help the low organic ranks to get to the top a little faster with loyal customers and visitors, but on the other hand knock them down if if they are not competitive enough with there offerings.
It is a compromise so far unless a SEO expert can level the playing field for us.
MrSaveware
SavewareUSA > Google it!
If they really want to protect surfer privacy, shouldn’t the default setting be OFF ?
Not a bad idea if it were opt in instead of opt out, The idea of embedding real time result into google search result page is ok
Even if it does display previously visited sites, they have been there and didn’t find what they need or they wouldn’t still be searching. It makes sense that users aren’t going to go to the same sites twice or bounce when they do, so I get them eventually.
If it is anything like the way AdSense ads have been behaving, Can I Have Another. I see the point of what we get and being able to get str8 results is easy enough. BUT, if someone looking for key words my sites and domains feature, then of course it’s good.
Keep it Str8!