Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide
That's a staggering statement meaning that every computer accessing Google is now being personalized, signed in or not, so any desktop, laptop or kiosk will start tracking everything everyone does and you won't be able to access the same search results from any two machines.
The possible impact to all is staggering.
- that adwords/search advertising has peaked and it is time to put it in to maintenance mode?
The marketing gurus have taken over Googleplex. Search and Adwords is identified as the Cash Cow. Mobile, Chrome, Android, and a Desktop cloud OS are problem children. Adsense is a dog. The main problem is they don't have a star. They are frantically going into random new product development mode in order to try and find a star.
I for one think that Google has been far more successful than it really should have been with search. A mixture of circumstances, good luck and a product that was a bit better than the opposition coupled with the front of altruistic, ad free, clean respectability gave them the push to become the number one search engine. Now they have become the #1 search brand and to be honest they probably think that brand loyalty and inertia will keep them going as #1 even if the product is not as good, filled with ads and basically a poor fit to what the founders set out to do.
SEO's, Webmasters, and site owners ... will start to work with services and places that do offer them the opportunity to acquire traffic.
It would be very difficult to replace traffic with anywhere like the volume we get from Google but I'm certainly searching for opportunities to reduce our reliance on Google. The biggest driver for us in this however is not a threat to organic rankings. For us increased competition on Adwords and the way that management of our budget has been wrenched from our hands by the Adwords algorithm is a much bigger threat. It is a little bit like having given in to the protection racketeers, we are now paying more and more but less customers are coming to our shop. One day we are going to say enough is enough and start to fight back against the racketeers. I sense that the day is not far away.
Cheers
Sid
I kind of see this as the same thing. Google will try to tailor the results based on our past preferences. If when I type in "trailers" and am always clicking on movie trailer links, well now G will give movie trailers more weight than say car trailers or truck trailers.
The day I search for and click on car trailer sites, then it shifts again.
They will always be chasing what happened in the past, and ASSUMING what I am looking for right now. It is hit or miss. I may have searched for car trailers yesterday, and today they gave those sites more weight, but now I am back searching for boat trailers, and all I'm getting is car and movie trailers.
I would rather see car, movie, truck and boat trailers all mixed in and let me realize I need to be more specific in what I am searching for. In the end it makes the search more useful to me if I am the one deciding ultimately what I am looking for... =)
You'll know when we customize results because a "View customizations" link will appear on the top right of the search results page.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 2:01 pm (utc) on Dec. 7, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]
And although this is certainly the best forum software I've ever seen :) in site search was never a strong point ..and seems to have disappeared ? ..
So most of us have got used to using gorg to search for old threads ..in the light of developments ..and in the interests of not giving away to gorg ( if they don't know already ) via their tracking who is behind the nicks here ..here are a couple of relevant threads from the past.
this one started by swa66 ..here [webmasterworld.com]
in which we found that inspite of ASA's protestations that even if you opt your adsense site out of "personalised search" ..that Gorg actually say that it will display adsense based on the visitors search history and not based upon your context ..
that appears to be what piatkow and others noticed earlier..
and this thread ..started by erku in which quotes from Gorgs own pages again showed that visitors will see adsense based on their ( now default history tracking) and not on your sites actual content ( as used to be the case with contextual old style adsense )..and that there is nothing that you can do about it ..
here [webmasterworld.com]
( of course gorg edit and change and remove so many things from their own pages to cover their tracks that they may have since removed the pages referenced ..or replaced them with images of kittens )
kittens are good for PR ..
</aside>
[Google Search] [Show Me Something New] [I'm Feeling Lucky]
When a person clicked that, they'd get clean results, with no influence whatsoever from cookies or from search history. Very simple implementation that threads the needle between Old Google and New Google.
..............................
Why has Google abandoned the marketing optimization community?
Maybe they got tired of being characterized as a villainous secret society in a Dan Brown novel? :-)
Brett, you mentioned Facebook (albeit not in the context of personalized search). Facebook is an obvious competitor of Google as a point of entry to the Internet, and it offers an extremely personalized experience. Given the competition (or potential) competition from Facebook and its ilk, would why would anyone expect Google to pretend that it and its users are still living in 1998?
Earlier in this thread, someone commented on the fact that many people use search engines as a way to reach their favorite sites, not just for general search. Chrome, Google's new browser, actually encourages this by letting users enter either a URL or a search term on the browser's address line. Personalized search is a natural complement to this way of using a browser, and it fits in with a strategy of encouraging Web users to make Google their point of entry to the Internet.
If I go to gorg or any of it's properties ( youtube et al ) or arrive on any ones site that carries ads served by a gorg service ( doubleclick say) ..I will ( by the mere act of opening the page in my browser ) get a highly persistant tracking cookie which will affect what I see elsewhere ..and I will not be told either of the cookies existence ..nor of it's purpose ..
SJ you are attempting to defend the indefensible (and a practice by Gorg which is illegal in at least one continent already ..Europe )..why
But who is suffering anxiety - not the general public who are using goog for searches - so why should goog be concerned.
Unless the general public is concerned/anxious about either the search results they are seeing or the privacy implications of their history being tracked (and don't think they will have too much problem with the former, if a little with the latter) then Goog are not going to feel under any pressure to change direction.
After all, surely the SE's are there primarily for the general public, not for us webmasters to promote our sites, a fact that appears to be bypassing a number of people here
Google has maximized all they can do with advertising and search. They believe their future and next major battle is in Chrome, Android, and a Desktop cloud OS. They no longer have the resources and man power to dedicate to search. Thus, there is no need to perform maintenance on the community.
Very likely. Plus a certain hubris that they are unwoundable, because they are -market share wise- so far ahead of the competition.
Adsense is a dog.
Absolutely agree. Now that we have taken off Adsense entirely off our main site, I have been considering using one of the ad blockers for Firefox. I looked at the most popular one and was utterly shocked - 610,000+ downloads PER WEEK. Even if just 50% of the people actually install, configure and use the plugin, that's still a whopping 32 million users a year. Probably the activation rate is increasing rather than slowing down. No wonder that this is popular, because it took me just 10 minutes to block Doubleclick ads, Adsense ads, and Analytics tracking.
I guess that Google MUST see this somewhere in their reports. I would be very very surprised if they did not see any impact.
The main problem is they don't have a star. They are frantically going into random new product development mode in order to try and find a star.
We have discussed some time ago that Google's product management is not a stellar team.
(Please see messages # 3801460 and # 3801482 here [webmasterworld.com]. Plus message # 3806676 here [webmasterworld.com]. These messages are a year old but still valid.)
I agree that they are indeed "frantically going into random new product development mode in order to try and find a star". Well said.
