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Personalize me - Yahoo and its Goog to Know You
By Jim Hedger (c) 2005 StepForth News Editor (http://www.stepforth.com)

Some people like to personalize everything, mixing and matching
from an enormous variety of options to suit their unique tastes.
Others are not so fond of the concept of information
personalization, fearing the trend will remove their ability to
access the same options everyone else gets while trampling
whatever sense of personal privacy they once held. Regardless of
how consumers personally feel about the concepts of data mining
and information personalization, it is now more of a modus
operandi than it is a trend in marketing. The major search
engines are adopting this method of operation with both Google
and Yahoo announcing personalized search features in the past
two weeks and MSN presenting information on one they are working
on.

Early last week, Google introduced the beta version of My Search
History. Requiring user registration, the feature records and
displays your Google search history, making it accessible on any
computer you might be working on. My Search History uses a
calendar format showing what you searched for, where the
searches took you, and the date and time of those searches. This
information is stored by Google and is easily viewed by clicking
a link added to the general search page at Google.com. Avni Shah
from the My Search History team explained Google's motivation in
a blog posting
(http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/04/from-lost-to-found.html)
last Wednesday (April 20).

"How many times have you used Google to find an obscure funny
website or fun facts about "The Wizard of Oz," but then got
distracted by other web pages and tasks? I know - me too.
Wouldn't it be great to find them again, and for that matter
review all your Google searches over time? Which is exactly why
we built My Search History
(https://www.google.com/searchhistory/login).

When you're signed in to your Google Account
(https://www.google.com/accounts/), you can use My Search History
wherever you go. An additional bit of fun: try the handy calendar
to check the level of your Google activity on a given day, or see
related searches you've done over time. Look for the link in the
upper right corner of your Google web search home page and
results pages."

While the results gathered by My Search History do not affect
general organic results, marketers expect Google to use the
information to better determine which paid-ads to serve
individual users. There is speculation that personalization
could eventually affect placement of organic listings displaying
Google AdSense, however there is no actual evidence to suggest
that will happen.

This week Yahoo responded with My Web, a slightly more powerful
personal search history-recording tool. My Web provides a
storage space for everything users choose to save while surfing
Yahoo search results. An RSS feed will allow users to blog and
distribute content from saved sites sharing notes, links and
other information inputted by the user. My Web promotes a form
of social networking giving individual users a personalized
space to evaluate information saved in their searches. The space
is built on the information My Web records while they move
through Yahoo results.

In a posting to the Ysearch Blog
(http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000104.html), Senior
Product Manager Kevin Akira Lee wrote, "Today, we launched a
'My Web', a new personal search engine fully integrated with
Yahoo! Search. My Web is based on a very simple principle - a
search engine should enable you to define and use the information
that's important to you. Specifically, My Web enables you to
find the information relevant to you, save it, share it, add
your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it's
three days or three months later.

The idea is a simple one - we provide a "Save" button on our
search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox),
and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the
Web. When you hit the "Save" button, My Web grabs that page and
makes a cached copy which is fully searchable. Anytime you need
that page, all you need to do is search My Web. You can publish
your My Web links via RSS and, of course, there's an API for My
Web published on YSDN."

My Web opens more doors for search marketers and advertisers.
Yahoo Search Marketing is working to integrate their various
features such as Yahoo360, Instant Messenger, YahooMail, etc,
with their paid-ad delivery network innovating on the model
outlined by Google's integration of AdWords and Gmail. By making
it easier for search marketers to work with their system, Yahoo
is betting they can motivate ad-buyers and search marketers to
migrate away from Google.

Both Google and Yahoo are responding to a larger long-term
threat posed by MSN's long-pending release of their
all-encompassing Longhorn operating system. First scheduled for
release in mid 2004, Microsoft now sees December 2006 as a
likely release date. Longhorn was meant to be the end-all-be-all
when it came to merging search tools into the operating system.
Back in 2003 when Microsoft started hyping it, Longhorn was
going to incorporate a desktop search feature, blog creation
features, a personalization tool called Stuff I've Seen, a
expandable toolbar, and dozens of other features that would give
the new operating system extra clout in the competitive world of
search. Everybody knows that MSN has the dice loaded with their
control of the vast majority of operating systems used on the
Internet. While Microsoft's absolute dominance might be cracking
with open source products taking huge shares of what was once
theirs, the software giant has been working triple time to enter
and dominate the search market.

Recently, MSN's research specialist Susan Dumais released a
presentation showing that Microsoft's vision of search is as
heavily influenced by its competitors as theirs are by
Microsoft. In her presentation
(http://www.infonortics.com/searchengines/sh05/slides/dumais.pdf),
"Personal Information Management, Helping the Finders Become the
Keepers" Ms. Dumas notes that search is about finding previously
retrieved information as much as it is about finding new
information. With a control over the operating system and
allowance from its users, Microsoft will be able to scan your
hard drive to find stuff you saw and saved that are in any way
relevant to your search query. Their recent experiments with
document clustering might point to the direction these
personalized results will be presented.

Over the past two years, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other
search firms have rolled out variations on products and features
thought to be incorporated in Longhorn. They have also developed
other products, innovating on other ideas and concepts in the
realm of information retrieval and distribution. The rapidity of
change in the information environment, along with the ironic
tendency of other firms to innovate on Microsoft's stated
intentions are the likely reasons Longhorn keeps getting pushed
back quarter after quarter. Even so, Longhorn is still said to
be coming and Google, Yahoo and the rest have only so many
months to make hay while the sun is definitely going to shine.

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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and
welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through
interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be
reached at "jimhedger@stepforth.com"
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