TheMadScientist - 8:22 am on May 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Personally, I think what we're seeing more than personalization right now is a move to more of an AI type system and IMO that's where the 'randomness' is coming from. I posted about it previously, but I think there's a combination of things going on that are going to take some time to sort themselves out, which IMO is good for the competition...

I was replying to a specific 'mindset' some people (not necessarily seolearner) seem to have. It may not be yours, but I wanted to make sure I drew a distinction for people who might think clearing personalization to get 'default results' could possibly tell them anything more than 'you're site is in the default results at N position on the datacenter you happened to hit at the time of the search and that happens to be IP Address independent, because an IP Address can get it's data from a number of different datacenters because of load balancing', so in reality as much as we (I anyway) would like to think it really tells us something, the reality is it does not tell us very much at all, IMO.

If you take the 'greater impact' of personalization over time, throw in a move to an AI type ranking system, a couple different tests on different datacenters that happen to be IP Independent and a few little algo changes here and there for good measure you might appear to have 'randomness' in the results for a period of time, I would think...