Yahoo Launches Personal Search

He, finally all webmasters can get exactly the SERPS they want - just block the competition ;)

On a more serious note, i should add that this could turn out to be a great tool, although i will need to regularly log in to benefit from it.

Just think how confusing this is going to get!

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.

Wow, yahoo is cranking out a lot of cool stuff lately.

Google is really digging themselves deeper on being stale and behind on search options.

That's pretty cool.

Are they going to be storing this data for each user?

If they do, wow.

The best applied piece of innovation in search for a while I'd say. But the amount of data they're storing must be horrific. And what are the privacy advocats gonna have to say about it.

This is pretty cool, now if they would let you search other people's "web"... oh the possibilities.

so has anyone figured out how to optimize for personalization yet?

cheers

Has yahoo filed for any patents for these ideas?

Wonder how they will integrate personal favorites and blocks into their normal serps if at all. I think they would though. This to me is kinda like Googles Smiley, Sad face icons except they dont remove the results while your surfing ;)

"integrate personal favorites and blocks into their normal serps if at all"

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.

how to optimize for personalization yet?

Make a site that is bookmarkworthy?

Lately, Google makes the headlines, Yahoo makes the progress.

Also lately, Google delivers the traffic, Y & MSN don't. Of course that will vary widely by site and industry. Is there a demand at this moment or a growing one for personalized search?

Presumably, most of the time you go to a search engine to find something new, not to find your favorites?

What will happen is that everyone that is logged into Y with Yahoo Messenger will get special SERPS. It will be turned on by default on YM. So all YM users will be getting personalized results. I'm glad that the number of YM users is not that big.

>>Google makes the headlines, Yahoo makes the progress.

Well, their implementation leaves a lot to be desired, imho.

Google does one thing well. Yahoo, you know!

you know it seems like a good idea, but I can't imagine a user clicking on a result, surfing all over their new found favorite site and then clicking the back button 10 times just so they can save this in the results.

I mean who knows what sites they want in the serps until they have actually viewed the page?

Funny thing is Amazon beat them to it!
and its a very cool search engine too ....

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).

wow thats a lot of amazon info for a yahoo thread :S

I mean who knows what sites they want in the serps until they have actually viewed the page?

Well I thought Y! made a blunder here too, but it seems they have a number of Favelets that allow you to modify your "myWeb" directly from your browser. I would have figured, the appropriate buttons would have just been added to their Toolbar.

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.

this has to be the way to do it.
these are common sense features, I was thinking of them when I was searching the other day for rare carpets.

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'm sorry I just can't imagine a user exploring a site and instead of simply bookmarking it, they press back 10 times to save its location in the serps - maybe I'm being narrow minded, so please someone explain to me how they see this happening?

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.

I thought browsers already had something like this....called bookmarks. Ever heard of them?

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 take back what I said before, this doesn't seem like a good idea. I didn't totally understand the whole system until I worked with it a bit more. Is it just me or is it just a personal page of bookmarks that is searchable? You guys can't honestly think this is that great?

The block feature is something that is very good.

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.

Yes, block site is definitely useful. This will raise the bar on spammy affiliate sites to have actually provide information in a useful way to pass the bar of the human eye.

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?

high prices

garish colors

high shipping costs

affiliate content

The list is endless.

> 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.

Think of the possibilities....Don't use it for the algo.

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.

SEO's create millions of user profiles in Yahoo

SEO's can create millions of links, too, but search engines have moved beyond simply counting raw links. Not too difficult to think of ways they could analyze this type of data beyond raw votes.

This is definitely the future. We all worry about our SERPS but they will be replaced in the future with a more personalized search based on preference info gathered from email, desktop search, contextual search, personalized search setting, locational search etc. Isnt that why all search engines are showing such a flurry of activity in all the above areas.

just beyond the Gbrowser, I see a Yahoo clone including RSS.

the block feature intrested me at first, but then i stopped and thought about it from a users point of view...

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!