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.
Have you ever lost a client(as a professional) due to a sudden, and unwanted by many professional persons and visitors to a clients property, change in privacy practice that has been rolled out by any source of traffic?
This is NOT in a spirit of Santa's favorite words if you will....
Thanks.
As a user I think it's ok.
What sucks is that sometimes you would tell someone to "go to the 4th result" if you search for "blah blah". I guess that may change now.
I did a search for one of my phrases, and found my site at #8. I clicked on my link, spent a few minutes on my site, then went back to search for another phrase. I then came back and searched for the first phrase, and my site was now #2.
How the heck can anyone optimize for this?
It seems like the entire reason a person searches is to find something NEW unless it is a navigational search (i.e. typing in Amazon instead of Amazon.com in the address bar). If you want to find something you are already familiar with then you would just GO DIRCTLY THERE and would have no need to search.
IMHO, to assume that a computer algorithm can correctly judge relevance or more importantly INTENT on anything other than a literal keyword search is flawed. It is why keywords on broad match have lower ROI than those more narrowly targeted on phrase or exact. If a computer algorithm could determine relevancy and INTENT, then all the advertising dollars would be flowing into banners/display media and Yahoo! would be the most profitable company on the net and have revenues far surpassing those of Google but they don't and they never will.
Having a near monopoly on consumer searches, this type of thing makes a HUGE difference. If it was a library making some information more accessable than other information or the librarian steering library users to a certain section before all else, there would be an instant firestorm. It raises privacy concerns for sure but more so than that is filtering information at the access point.
Since it is a search engine and is rather invisible to the average user, it doesn't get picked up much but has a much more profound impact on the public and the information they are likely to access.
If Google had 30% marketshare it woudn't be that big of a deal, if it was OPT-IN, that would be in line with "Don't Be Evil". When was the last time some new feature launched as Opt-in? Never, cause people don't really want it or care but collecting all that information is in line with shareholder value. If you're going to be a 100B company, ya gotta be pretty ruthless. There is no state of equilibrium where a [public] corporation has made enough money.
It IS all inline with the goal of "organizing the world's information". When all the world's information is organized, there is no need for anything but Google, merchants and consumers. If all commerce information is organized, merchants (who then might be only manufacturers if all the middle men are cut out including the retail level) get squeezed to the bone on margins. Disorganized information or "friction" in the marketplace keeps millions of people employed. It adds stability and sustainability to a marketplace or even a biological ecosystem. Wipe out all the "friction" in commerce and you have a lot of displaced & unemployed people.
It seems like the entire reason a person searches is to find something NEW
I don't think so. People will much more like the SERPS, when they usually find the things they are looking for on sites they already know and trust.
Lets say, you are looking for "blue widgets" and click on serious-widgets.tld (and do not bounce back to the SERPS but stay on their site). Your neighbor did the same search and clicks on funny-widgets.tld. Next time, both of you are looking for "green widgets" and you get the result from serious-widgets.tld higher in the SERPS while your neighbor gets the result from funny-widgets.tld listed higher. The individual satisfaction with the SERPS is of course higher, not possible with aggregating all the data.
Culturally this may become a problem some day, since everybody lives in his own little and completely personalized world. Ads, movies, music, search results, everything "individual", no shared experiences or memories. But that is still some years in the future.
In the present, the main problem is privacy. Google and others have been gathering this data already for years, actually nothing new there. But people will notice it more and more. And people will start to dislike it more and more. Google has to find a way to collect individual data without collecting individual data.
In the future it will be much harder to spot if/why certain results do not show up, and if not how widespread "the problem" is. It will not only be difficult to find out what is going on behind the curtains, no, it will be difficult to find out THAT something is going on behind the curtains! It's a dream come true for any censor in any country! Censor whatever you wish without the majority of people being able to notice the changes. Some people may conduct searches, e.g. on a mass-massacre in a certain country, and see certain sites. Others, the majority, may not see them, and Google can simply claim that their algos have selected "better results" for those folks. And when the political leader fires up Google in front of the press, showing a perfectly innocent face, he may search for a certain term and find even the most critical pages (while the majority of his people won't).
That's the PERFECT cover for any manipulation. It's truly disgusting.
Alas, the "these search results have been altered to meet local laws" statement at the bottom of a SERP can be removed, makign the user interface even better and more easy to use.
We've seen some weird referrals lately but no real changes in traffic on a seasonally adjusted basis.
