gn_wendy - 1:13 pm on Dec 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Privacy issues aside, the point about personalised search (custom-search-by-default) is that we just don't know what position our site occupies in the SERPs that any one searcher is looking at.

What I have always liked about search is that it needs to be handled on a macro scale.

G' has been adjusting results based on user-stats for a while now (at least, I am convinced of this). The fact that individual users are getting their own results customized as opposed to all users sharing the same aggregate data should have a seemingly small impact for the average website. Since, if you take all custom SERPs - and then average them out - you should get data matching the non-personalized SERPs.

I'm trying to figure out a way to test this, but I'm flying kinda blind to be honest.