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what do you guys think.... i kinda see it been the future..
DaveN
[mysearch.yahoo.com...]
Gone are the days of only having to figure out the algo. Personal preferance is now being thrown into the play.
Time to retire? :)
Mack.
I was thinking the same - though I think while they may factor in favorites, I can't imagine that they would be stupid enough to factor in blocks. That would allow competition to hurt you in the SERPs. The save site feature would be a lot harder to abuse than the block site feature. Yep, wave of the future.
Presumably, most of the time you go to a search engine to find something new, not to find your favorites?
I mean who knows what sites they want in the serps until they have actually viewed the page?
sleepy
[a9.com...]
Amazon's new search engine A9 (Sept 21 2004)
Last week, Amazon officially launched its search engine A9.com. A9 is the first search engine with strong personalization features. It looks as if A9 has the potential to become a major search engine.
What is special about A9?
The A9 search engine tries to provide a new search experience. A9 offers search results from different information sources, which are presented through selectable and adjustable columns (web and image search, book text search, movie information search, dictionary search, etc.)
A9.com is "a search engine with a memory" as it returns results from the user's information, so with every search, users will see results from their own history, bookmarks, and diary.
A9 also offers new features to manage online search. For example, a search history is stored and displayed to users anytime they are signed-in either from home or from work.
A9 offers a diary that allows users to record, save and reference notes about any web page they visit. In addition, A9 offers a bookmark manager.
Privacy concerns
If you have an Amazon account, A9 will automatically recognize you. A9 also remembers what you searched in the past. A user's A9 activity can be tied to a user's history on Amazon.com.
The A9 privacy policy says it very clearly:
"Please note that A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. If you have an account on Amazon.com and an Amazon.com cookie, information gathered by A9.com, as described in this privacy notice, may be correlated with any personally identifiable information that Amazon.com has and used by A9.com and Amazon.com to improve the services we offer."
If you use all A9 features and buy at Amazon, then Amazon knows who you are, your complete address, which web sites you visit, which products you purchase, etc.
A9 is also available in a generic version that doesn't collect personal information. However, the generic version doesn't offer all features of the full version.
What does this mean to you?
Although A9 currently uses Google index it might become a Google rival in the near future. A9's chief executive officer Udi Manber was the chief scientist at Yahoo before joining Amazon.
A9's personalization features will probably be copied by other search engines soon. This might be the overture to a shift in the search engines market. The first other major search engine with personalization features is Ask Jeeves (see news below).
I mean who knows what sites they want in the serps until they have actually viewed the page?
Y! launching personalized search isn't *that* surprising though. With the aforementioned launch of A9 and myJeeves, Yahoo! executives were probably jealous of the press their rivals were receiving. How hard would this technology be to develop for a company the size of Yahoo anyway? I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO made a demand for personalized search, and the tech team responded.
I still don't think url blocking and a searchable bookmark list qualifies as "personalized search"; however, I guess it's a start..
From Y!, emphasis added:
It's the beginning of a uniquely personal way to search.
I'd say that's akin to saying the wheel was the beginning of mass transit, but you have to start somewhere.
Who loses: poor sites, who fail to be bookmarked and possibly get blocked
Who wins: users; and well made sites which get saved.
I don't think the saving and remarking of websites will affect the algo - it's just a user "power tool"
But I see this as a HUGE victory for websites that rely on search engines for traffic. With saved searches, users will more & more go to their search engines and look up results from the past. Less will they depend on their memory (brand recall).
Search just got bigger; for those of you in the SEO game, get ready for more business. And webmasters, gear up for more traffic.
I can see the block feature working - user searches for widgets, finds a spam page and backs out, quickly blocks this from results and moves on until they find the site they want.
Other than the block feature, there is nothing new here that you couldn't already do in a browser. Want to save a search? Bookmark the results page. Wow!
Why would you want to save a search anyways? It would probably be faster to just type the query in again rather than searching through a list of all your saved searches.
I don't know about everyone else, but when I see a cookie-cutter affiliate site with the same product and sales pitch that I've already seen 5x when searching for something I get very annoyed. If I could delete them from ever showing up again in my serps... or one step further --- if the search engine could effectively PREDICT that I don't like these types of sites and rank them lower, then that is the search engine I would like to use.
This is what I've been waiting for... finally a system that could penalize sites no one seems to find useful, yet magically seem to rise to the top of the results.
I know many sellers of tangible products will find this very useful for competitive research since this is an effective way to remove affiliate sites that provide no value in terms of additional product details, opinions, reviews. I'm certainly very tempted to change my home page from Google to Yahoo for this very reason.
This is also an excellent research tool for businesses that want to search vertical industries and categorize specific links for retrieval later. Adding notes is a nice touch which bookmarking a site can not do.
or one step further --- if the search engine could effectively PREDICT that I don't like these types of sites and rank them lower
In my mind, the above would be a part of search actually becoming personalized. However, I'd say it's further than a step away. It's one thing to let Joe Blow tell you he doesn't like Site A, but it's an entirely different thing to know he wouldn't like Site B. There are just too many variables in place. What exactly did the user not like about Site A?
The list is endless.
One could say the same thing about e-mail spam, but I really don't think it is that much different from how e-mail clients are able to discern ham (good e-mail) from spam (bad e-mail).
Come to think of it, I can see SpamBayes type of filter being used on search results to create personalized search results that better fit your tastes. Periodically, we could review sites that were filtered to see if they are truely "spam" sites, or sites we would have accept as ham.
1. Highly Blocked sites get lower listing in SERPS. (that should be good for users)
2. Highly ambitious SEO's create millions of user profiles in Yahoo to Block competitor sites and Competitors disappear from listings. (Blog spam doesn't look so bad now)
I don't see the real need for blocking sites, remembering my bookmarks or previous searches. How often do you search for the same thing? I don't do searches from the portal my browser opens too, I search from the Search Bar in Firefox or IE. I want it simple, I want it to work well and don't remember what I do, I usually want to forget most of it anyways.
just beyond the Gbrowser, I see a Yahoo clone including RSS.
How many time when searching for something you need to tweek the search term, but the same site that didn't help you in the pass pops up again ....BLOCK BLOCK ... then tweak.
I'm a die hard LUFC fan so ManU BLOCK BLOCK, I Hate/Love BUSH ;) hehehe so I Block him or Kerry.... too much data dilution I feel now if it was a KEYWORD Blocker OH HUM ......
Anyways nice features Y!