Earlier this week, Google launched what I consider to be the company's next step in personalized search - "search options." Essentially, it is a link searchers can click, which brings up a left-side navigation menu that allows for different ways of searching.
The following video shows how it works if you have not yet experimented with it for yourself:
Google's Searchology event was today, and Google used this to give kind of a "state of search" presentation, something the company often does in a variety of formats.
One of the highlights of the event was Marissa Mayer introducing some changes to Google's search results. This is called "Search Options," and allows users to "slice" and "dice" results in a number of ways.
In a recent report, Hitwise said that the length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of 5+ words in length, have increased 10% from January '08 to January '09 they noted.
Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:
In recent months, there has been a whole lot of talk about where search is going, and what search is lacking. This is commonplace for months encompassing the changing of years.
A big part of the discussion is personalized search. Many SEOs aren't entirely thrilled with the idea. It changes the way they have to do things. Do searchers want it though?
As I was writing a piece on RushmoreDrive, the search engine (and more) that was created as a way to provide relevant results from the black community, I started thinking about how the future of search could impact its use and the use of niche search engines in general. Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers on this topic, but it raises some interesting questions nonetheless.
Google has announced SearchWiki, which is a new set of functionality that users with Google accounts can use to customize their results on any given search. SearchWiki allows users to move specific results up or down in rankings so that they appear in the preferred order when the same search is done in the future.
When someone searches for the term "dog," they're very likely interested in our furry friends. But a few folks might be curious about digital on-screen graphics, and won't want to dig through stuff about rottweilers and retrievers. So personalized search remains as important as ever.
In a previous article, Is Universal Search Harder?, I discussed how a universal type of search can actually make finding what you are searching for more difficult. Google includes their own version of Universal Search in many of their search results pages, bringing us news, images, videos and so forth along with traditional web pages.
Another way that Google has changed the playing field as far as search engine optimization is through Personalized Search.
Facebook’s a formidable entry in the social networking field - we all know this. But the company’s announcement that it is also doing well in people search (indeed, in Facebook’s own words, it is the “[m]ost used people search engine on the web”) came as a surprise to many.
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