It seems that one of the big BUZZ topics is personalization. Meaning that the search engines are starting to personalize results based on each user. If you think about how much data each of the search engines has on us they can easily do this. Google is doing this extensively already. One example was of the same search done from 5-6 different locations using the same computer. Each was different and provided different results. Not all of them seemed right or to make sense. But you can easily see the direction that Google is going with personalization.
Personalization is based on several items.
- Current tasks. What the user is actually doing.
- The user’s search history.
- The user’s web history in general. What services to they use and what sites do they frequent.
- Social patterns. This is the idea of matching users who do the same things online and then providing custom search results based on the social group you fall into. Common memberships, bookmarks, and search behavior.
Gordon Hotchkins from enquiro.com had a very interesting “heat map” of where a user’s eyes track on a page with personalization compared to a standard page. He used Google in his example and it was amazing. The personalized page had many more “hot spots” on the page and it totally changed the way the user viewed the page. I will try and get these screen shots and post them to my blog. But the idea is that a better user experience is better for both the user and the advertiser. There is some talk about how better organic search or personalized data means less paid clicks. But I think a better user experience can only mean more searches and more eyeballs.
There is also an idea that Google has come up with a “personal quality rank”. Not only does Google want to rank pages but they want to rank Internet users. Then they will use the high quality users to effect the results of the lower quality users. So we need to design our sites to attract high quality visitors. This will then improve our search engine rankings. This is a strange idea and it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Google has a patent on this idea.
Jonathan Mendez had some great ideas. (He is very impressive and knows his stuff). One was how you can use the parameters from the organic search engine referrals. Google passes many parameters such as language, country, keywords and more. So the idea is if someone comes into your site after doing a search in spanish for example, you can then serve up spanish content. That is a powerful idea!
Many searches are very subjective. Searches like “Cool Furniture” or “What doctor should I use”. The search engines currently have no way to provide relevant results for these types of searches. They need to personalize their searches to give the users what they want.
What all this means to the search engine optimizer is that it is getting harder and harder. Everyone will start getting different results based on the user instead of on page elements or links. Everything is getting more complex!
no comment untill now