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.
FYI
[news.cnet.com...]
Cheers
Sid
[edited by: engine at 3:33 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2009]
[edit reason] added reference link [/edit]
A senior exec at Mozilla is saying Firefox users should use the Bing search extension.
Yeah, saw that as well. I really like his rational argumentation, especially considering that Google has been funding a good portion of the Firefox development.
The sequence is as follows:
- 3 PPC results
- 1 news result
- new magazine image results
- real-time section
- FINALLY THE FIRST ORGANIC RESULT (that do not show in the complete first fold)
Note: I am using firefox with only Google toolbar installed and viewing at 1280*1024 resolutions.
if google can see that you've searched golf sites in the past, then it can assume you mean those.
But what if you don't? That's why we need a button to switch it off. Right? Anybody who never searches for the same kind of book twice at Amazon knows that suggestions based on past searches are at best irrelevant and at worst an irritant.
The only way to accurately check where your site shows up in the actual results other people see is to be served their results, so what's the point of bothering to try to get 'non-personalized' results...
I hate to repeat myself, but here again is my post from 12/06. In case any of the Google Guys/Gals are paying attention, this still strikes me as one solution to the mess they've made for themselves:
They could make much of this anxiety go away simply by adding a new button, positioned in the mddle below their search field:[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.
Google assumes baloney. There is an important keyword in my niche that is spelled differently than it is in the mainstream. That variant spelling has historical use going back to 1908. For a long time, Google was fine with the two different spellings and gave two different sets of results. That way you could not have to deal with the mostly not pertinent results from the ordinary way to spell the word. Like a lot of other people catering to this niche, I maximized my site for the non-ordinary way to spell the word, since I knew that the customers I wanted would be searching on that spelling. But at a certain point Google decided that it would return the same results for both--the results it gave for the mainstream spelling. I actually wrote to them about this (and I'm sure other people did too), and they changed it back to serving two separate results for a while, but now it's back to treating the variant spelling like a misspelling. If this is an example of Google knowing what we want based on our search history, well, it's ham-handed.
A senior exec at Mozilla is saying Firefox users should use the Bing search extension.
I'm not sure that a director of community development for an open-source browser producer has better insights into Google Personalized Search than anyone else does, and the fact that Google's own Chrome is now competing with Firefox might be coloring his thinking. If nothing else, this just goes to show that the software industry produces some strange bedfellows--in this case, an odd coupling between a Mozilla exec and Microsoft.
What strikes me about this thread is how much anger it's produced: not only in regard to the privacy issue (which is a far bigger issue than whatever role it may play in Google Personalized Search), but also in terms of search results. If personalized search results are as chaotic and useless as people here seem to think, shouldn't Googlephobes be grateful--even thrilled--that Google has taken a path that will drive more users to other search engines? Shouldn't the Bing for a Month [webmasterworld.com] advocates be lifting their pints or wineglasses in a collective salute to Google Personalized Search?
...why not address the question that I posed?
Because non-personalized results provide the baseline from which all personalization begins? Seriously SJ, I think non-personalized results are still more important than any personalized data. If you have a high ranking on a non-personalized SERP, my guess (no data yet to back this up) is that you have a better chance of a higher ranking on a personalized SERP.
FWIW, I think the Register article got it right. This is Google retreating from the spam problem and putting it back in the user's hands.
And so I lift my glass to thank Google for their Personalized Search, and especially to Mr. Schmidt for giving his opinion on privacy as clearly as possible (which is -admittedly- quite rare to hear from Google).
Cheers, Google!
The way I see it, the goal of any commercial search engine is to collect vast amounts of user data for reuse/resale. Google just happens to be better at this game than any of the others...
