The Future of Search - Personalization

Here are two links:

Official Google Blog: Putting Users In Charge

Financial Times: Google's search policy puts the user in charge, by Peter Fleischer

These are links to one Googler exercising some educated speculation about where the future of search (and Google) might lie. Basically, the article on Financial Times website is about how personalization is really the key to the future of search. If search algorithm is not built to remember a user's preferences and history, we can only take search so far. By producing universal results that are the same for everyone, we're never going to solve the problem of intentions behind the search phrases. For example, when someone searches for "Paris", are they searching for the city or Paris Hilton? Nobody really knows, but we will probably have a clue if we know the person.

What if they are looking for pictures of Paris, France? An image search for "Paris" brings up just as many pictures of the woman as the city. Of course, we all know how dangerous an image search can be for any phrase, especially if conducted in a work environment. Just spend a few minutes using city names as search phrases in Google image search.

But that aside, what is this going to mean for the future of the SEO industry? Right now, SEO involves aiming at SERs that are absolute. For example, someone searching for “Paris” in Bogota will see the same thing as someone in Miami searching for the same phrase. However, if SERs suddenly become relative to the user’s preferences and history, the user in Miami might see different results based on his/her perceived age (past searches for myspace, facebook, or other social websites), entertainment savvy (past click-thrus to EntertainmentWeekly.com), or other personal web surfing habits. The user in Bogota may be a college professor (past visits to Google Journal Search, Google Book Search, and click-thrus to university websites). This is similar to the philosophy of Amazon.com’s algorithm, which has been profiled in several new stories as a seriously intelligent marketing machine, remembering users’ past behavior and recommending new products accordingly.

The foremost question for SEOers is, how are we going to optimize pages if we don’t know what users are going to see on the SERPs? How much business are our clients going to loose because of this, and will it outweigh the business that they stand to gain?

But another question is, how is this going to affect advertising on SEs? If I want to make a bid on a phrase on Google adwords – for example, “Paris” – how can I be sure that Google is giving me a proper ROI if some people who type in “Paris” are going to see different things than other people, based on their usage history? On the other hand, will this greatly improve the quality of the impressions I get, when I do get impressions? Will the viewers be more likely to be interested in my ad, if Google is sure that their past usage indicates an interest in the subject matter?

I think I’ve just formed two complete paragraphs with nothing but interrogatives. I’m sure there is a grammar rule against that.