Despite the session’s title, the Q&A quickly devolved into less of a discussion of “Fear or Not” and more into “Why did you do this to us, Google?!” (Followed closely by the response, “You’re not normal. Er, a regular user.”)
Search Engine LandThe basic definition of personalized search is results are reordered based on what’s deemed to meet your personal preferences. Pages may move up or down or even out of the top 10 (usually 1 page leaves the top 10). Personalization influencers
- iGoogle (personal homepage) content
- Google bookmarks
- Search history (clicks)—a noisy signal to be used on a large scale, but it’s not noisy for just one person
- Web history (visits)
- Inflates your opinion of Google: I’m #1 for my name! My stuff is tops! I rule.
Google is pushing web history.
And then there’s Yahoo. Their closest competitor in personalization features is MyWeb, which is about two years old. You can save pages to MyWeb. Old features included adding notes and blocking sites (Wikipedia be gone!). Yahoo collected information and could have used it. But they don’t.
Ask’s MyStuff has the ability to save info in folders. (He then gave an example of how to save something.) It’s a fundamental, rudimentary take—let’s reshape our results on what you’re clicking on.
Summary: Google is the only major search engine that’s doing it. Yahoo and Ask are harvesting some information but haven’t put it to use yet. Google is likely to be even more aggressive with personalization over time. Their reasons: it reduces spam (potentially) and delivers better results (potentially). SEO personalization revolves around users: search history, web history, current tasks, social patterns. If personalization is in place, social search can be an offshoot of personalization. But it’s very difficult for a marketer to look at an individual users.We think we’re gonna look at buckets of behavior that work around themes: themes around products or things. Long tail optimization becomes really interesting because it’s more personalized—and more important.
Universal results & personalization: personalization can drive a much more confident universal SERP. Gord loves that understanding user behavior will be vital to success. Knowing what people are looking for will be vital. User-centered development will take hold.
Black hat techniques in this area: your results depend on your past history. For optimizers, there is a green field in which they can play: emerging spaces that are new topics without web histories. Create “buzz sites” around new, budding content as an SEO tactic.
Moving up the funnel.
For SEOs, a lot of our optimization has been about moving up the conversion funnel. Personalization moves SEOs up the funnel. Be clearer on the SERPs when a result is there because of personalized search and not a normal result. If they’re that much better then why not highlight them? - Make it easier for people to turn off personalized search. Right now it’s so difficult.
- If you’re going to try to spam personalized search, social media is the best way to do it. That’s your best bet. They’ll bookmark or link to your site. If there are lots and lots of people bookmarking your sites, that’s probably a less noisy and more reliable signal that they’ll take into account.
Personalization = understanding the user better. Also under this is query categorization and better understanding query intent.
The subtlety we’ve missed is in user connections.
Different techniques of search personalization- Session-based. Looking at what a user is specifically using for. Disambiguate the query based on the clicks and query. The challenge is figuring out where sessions begin/end. When do you shift topics/themes?
- Interest-based personalization. Understand the interests of the user based on their own declared preferences or user behavior inside or outside of the search content. Challenge: users sometimes do searches outside their areas of interest/normal behavior (like client work!)
Impact of personalization on search results
Queries should get shorter. Current average is ~2.7 words. For example: library vs. boston library (quite spooky that he and Gray Wolf would think of almost identical examples).
More of the top ten should be relevant to the user assuming a strict intent is extrapolated from the query. Impact on SEO
Since they’re doing a better job of matching the results that show up to queries, it behooves SEOs to create more relevant content. Give the search engine enough content per page to help it determine the topicality of that page. 30-35% of searches are for opinion-based queries: best restaurant, cool lamps. If SEOs come in, these can yield borderline spam sometimes. (He shows an example of a top 10 result for “cool lamps” with, well, not cool lamps. Very normal lamps.)
Socially-influenced results: his friend tagged some cool lamps, he gets served with them. Her reputation is on the line with that link. There’s a social incentive for people to help and tag things appropriately. The inherent idea behind personalization is better results. This is powerful because different people think about different things in different ways. Personalization should not be a surprise. It’s been coming for a long time (Danny mentioned how we’ve seen this predicted for years). If we know even a little bit of information because you’re willing to opt in, then we can give you better SERPs.PageRank by itself takes links and says how important those links are and puts those votes in ranks and runs over and over again.
Everyone has different singular value compositions, etc. You get different PageRanks for pages for sports people and tech people and cat people. Then you can blend that. Personalization is a dense version of PageRank across the entire web.
Personally I think it’s handy. You can find old searches and find what clicks actually helped you.
Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. &pws=0 (thanks to Ionut Alex Chitu for that one).
Personalizing news improved the click-through rate 40-50%. What if Ask were doing it? Would it be icky if Ask were doing it?
We hear a lot about the importance of diversity in search results, listing pages from lots of different sites. Might personalized search hinder that?
Matt: The simplest example of that is the current 2 results from each site (called host/site crowding). I think we were the first major search engine to do this. Right after we brought it out, a VC emailed me raving about it. Without it, you’d have all kinds of crap from Geocities or Tripod. You can also think about genres. We need information, blogs, reviews—a good thing all together. It can be complimentary to personal results. Within this genre, what’s the best site for their interests? There’s still a wall for that. By and large, there’s opposition but they can work together. del.icio.us has a diverse audience that’s actively tagging. Is it influencing SERPs?
Tim: We use signals from those pages to increase diversity. Rather than just getting signals from you, we’re getting signals from other users who like similar things.
Follow up: Yahoo owns a lot of thematic verticals. Are you going to use that data in SERPs?
Tim: There’s an opportunity for that, but it’s important to give the users what they want & the best results. How deeply does Google try to guess at or identify the demographic of the user? (gender profiling)
Matt: In my experience, no. You don’t have to provide demographic information to register. Geographic information can make a big difference. Historically, Google hasn’t tried to collect or guess demographic data. I think I saw an MSN paper on trying to guess the age/gender of surfer.
Tim: To clarify that, since Google started as search, and Yahoo started as a media company, we collect different kinds of info. Hotjobs for example required that information to register. They may be useful to search.
Gord: This is marking a new generation for search on marking new signals on query-based intent. We don’t want the organic results and sponsored ads to be too far out of sync: expect the sponsored answer soon. There’s totally arbitrary host crowding.
Personalization impacts familiar territory. But they’ll leverage this however they can to improve search. There’s a lot of room to develop there. It’ll fuel a lot of innovations behind the interface and within the interface itself. If you’re worried about opting in out, you’re an anomaly. We have to think about regular users.
Matt: About 10% of queries are misspelled. If you could guess grade level, age, etc. from those mistakes, if you can find out what kind of a searcher somebody is, you can return better SERPs. Have you done any eyetracking studies relative to personalized versus nonpersonalized SERPs?
Gord: It’s funny you’ve mentioned that, I was just thinking that. It’s tough because personalization is so individualized, that it’s very tough to mock up. It would be fascinating. If you combine personalization with those results. Is &pws=0 a one off parameter? What happened to “turn off personalized search”?
Matt: There’s a funny story. We’re trying to simplify a mental model. Very few people actually care. When we have parameters at Google they can be sticky or not. I think it’s not sticky. If you’re checking a bunch of kw, I’d just log out. I’m upset that there’s no transparency with personalized search. A second issue: I’m lazy user. Most people in search know spell checks work so well that you don’t care about spelling. I know the speller works.
Matt: We think overall it’s better. If you’re not signed in, it’s not personalized.
Gord:Suggest a Correction
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