Personalized Search Versus Personal Choice

Personalized search is a hot topic especially since Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced they are aggressively developing this service.

http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html that is pretty interesting to test. You're told to click on Health, then the General Health checkbox and search for "stanford." When searching for the word "bob" instead of "stanford" at the Minimum Personalize setting the first three results are "Bob the Builder," "Bob Marley" and "Bob Dylan". The rest of this page has no health related information on it as well. But, when the slider is pulled to Maximum Personalize, "Dr. Bob" has the first two positions followed the other results mentioned above. Its obvious Google has a ways to go in developing this. Personal Privacy If personalized search is to succeed, then personal privacy issues need to be addressed and concerns held to a minimum. Will personalized search involve searching your hard drive to see what your interests are? Will your interests be stored in a cookie on your computer? What happens when multiple users share a computer - will someone else get hit with all sorts of Preparation H advertisements because of the hemorrhoid treatment searches you wanted to keep private? And will children be affected by adult personalized searches? These are all questions that the SE's need to address so that people do not feel that their privacy is being violated or put at risk. The more control and choice the user has over personalized search the more likely it has in succeeding for the search engines. Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource

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