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Google's Personalized Results
By Jim Hedger (c) 2007

Two years ago, Google presented a personalized homepage for 
account holders. This weekend, it officially rolled out 
personalized search results as a member service. 

Now appearing on Google account pages, a prompt-box reads: "New! 
Google services will now be more personalized with Google 
Accounts. Learn More" (http://www.google.com/support/accounts/
bin/answer.py?answer=54041&hl=en) 

Google account holders, (those with Google Toolbar, Bookmarks, 
Gmail, AdWords, and other Google member-based appliances) will 
now, by default, see results tailored to their own unique search 
histories whenever they are signed in to their accounts.  

Personalization will subtly skew results in favour of documents 
or URLs visited regularly by individual users. If, for example, 
a user tends to visit a popular travel site when booking tickets 
and accommodation, results from that site are more likely to 
rank prominently in relevant travel related keyword queries.  

According to Google's Web Help Center, 
(http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26651&ctx=sibling)

"Personalized Search is part of Google's ongoing effort to make 
your search experience more relevant to you. Using Personalized 
Search, you can: 

• Get the results most relevant to you, based on what you've 
  searched for in the past 

• View and manage your past searches, including the webpages, 
  images, news headlines and Froogle results you've clicked on 

• Create bookmarks you can access from any computer

Personalized Search orders your search results based on your 
past searches, as well as the search results and news headlines 
you've clicked on. You can view all these items in your Search 
History and remove any items you'd like. 

Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search 
results, but as you build up your search history, your 
personalized search results will continue to improve." 

Google is drawing user information from Google Search History, 
Google Bookmarks, and personalized Google homepages. A note on 
a Google Accounts page says they are not using personal 
information gleaned from Gmail or AdWords accounts. Though not 
used to affect personalized results, Google is also storing 
search results from Google Image Search, Google News, Froogle, 
Google Video and Google Maps in the Search History file of its 
individual users.  

Being logged into any Google account triggers personalized 
results. Also, signing up for a new Google account automatically 
enrolls users in the three Google products personal information 
are being drawn from.  

Users with privacy concerns can stem Google's collection of data 
by entering their user account and clicking off the default 
"Enable Search History" box-option. According to Danny Sullivan, 
who wrote a detailed review (http://searchengineland.com/
070202-224617.php) of the sign-up and opt-out process at 
SearchEngineLand, "You can override the decision to have 
Search History enabled, but honestly, you'll need sharp eyes. I 
completely missed that this was added as a default choice to the 
new account sign-up page (https://www.google.com/accounts/
NewAccount). In fact, I missed it twice, as I tested the system 
by making two different accounts." (source: Google Ramps Up 
Personalized Search (http://searchengineland.com/070202-224617.php)
– Search Engine Land) 

Personalization will alter the search results seen by unique 
users over time though people might not notice a huge difference 
in the first weeks. As a person's search history accumulates 
data, search references will increasingly show frequently 
visited sites and references to sites that share common links 
with pages in the user's search history and those of similar 
users.  

For the SEO industry, the implications of personalization are 
both stark and subtle. While the trend towards regionalization 
has limited clear standards for judging overall Google rankings 
for the past few years, the advent of personalized results makes 
the standard website ranking report somewhat useless.  

Personalization pretty much kills the ambitions of the simplest 
SEO shops. Successful SEO campaigns will never again be measured 
by strong rankings. SEOs will come to think about their services 
in a very different way than many do today. It's no longer about 
making a document or site rank high on results pages, it's now 
about making them rank well consistently.  

Optimization techniques for personalized search results will 
include expertise in site usability, visitor retention, traffic 
funneling, bookmarking and social tagging, all of which entered 
the unwritten book of SEO best practices over the past few 
years. It will also involve a stronger dedication to content 
creation, document upkeep and overall resourcefulness.  

Site usability has a direct effect on visitor retention. 
Websites with easily accessed, high quality information will 
likely see visitors stay on site longer and come back more 
frequently. Similarly, websites that move visitors from one page 
to the next in a logical fashion should (logically) tend to 
score better in personalized result sets. As Google records the 
number of times a specific user visits a site, those a person 
visits most often will score better placements in that user's 
personalized results.  

Google Bookmarking, or prompting specific users to add a site or 
document to their Google Bookmark file, will become an integral 
tool for SEOs. Google draws information from Google Bookmarks to 
develop personalized sets of search results for each user.  

Google supports its own custom bookmark system and stores 
individual user's bookmark files on its own servers. Getting 
users to add a site to their Google Bookmarks file isn't as 
simple as adding a Ctrl+D Internet Explorer "Bookmark Us" link, 
though adding that link is strongly advised. There are 
extensions available allowing individuals to copy their IE or 
Firefox bookmarks into Google Bookmarks.  

A more direct Google Bookmarking method involves prompting 
visitors to include a RSS feed from your site to their 
personalized version of Google's homepage by placing an Add to 
Google button on the website. Another direct method is to use 
the Google Gadgets API (http://www.google.com/apis/homepage/) 
to create customized content-feeds that visitors can add to 
their unique personalized Google homepage.  

Please note, none of these methods actually gets a site or 
document into individual Google Bookmark files directly but 
serves to steer users towards including them. The last two will 
put site content directly on an individual user's Google 
homepages.  

Does personalization mark the end of the spider? Absolutely not. 
Personalized results will rely heavily on data accumulated by 
Google's bots as they analyze content between linked sites. The 
inclusion of one document in several people's Google Bookmarks 
files will strengthen the chances that other documents sharing 
links from the one in several Bookmarks files will appear in 
those user's personalized results. Personalization will have a 
beneficial effect on the ethical side of the link building 
industry, starting with an immediate growth providing social 
search link building and bridging services.  

As Google scans sites in its users search history and bookmark 
files, it will follow links it finds there. Many of those 
documents will also appear in that user's search history or 
bookmark files. They will also appear in the search histories 
and bookmarks of other users with similar search histories. 
Those documents are likely to fare well in searches conducted by 
numerous other users because Google will spot the shared 
interest by following links and matching search histories 
against each other.  

Google will also be better able to spot and eradicate link spam 
by enabling Google to better analyze how individual users treat 
links as they come across them. Given the vast majority of users 
will tend to stray away from obvious spam, and links that do not 
get clicked will be less useful as time goes on, much of the 
incentive to try to manipulate results with spammy links is 
removed.  

In all, Google's move towards presenting personalized search 
engine results will likely create a better search experience for 
its users. Though there are a wide array of privacy concerns 
Google will have to weave its way through and several assurances 
it will have to make, the creation of a truly effective 
personalized search engine ranks among the holy grails of 
geekdom for AI enthusiasts. This week, they took a big step 
forward. It will be interesting to see where this step leads 
us. 
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Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific
writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous
search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews,
Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

He is currently Executive Editor for the Jayde Online news
sources SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com) and SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com). You can also find additional tips
and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Jim at the SiteProNews
blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/).
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