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.
I agree with sb, the way that Google will implement personalisation, if other major changes in the past are anything to go by will be incompetent. The reason for this is what is motivating them to make the change. This is not about providing a better user experience it is about a better user take for Google. Maximising profit. If their driver was "improving the user experience" then they might have half a chance of doing it in a way that was useful to individuals but it isn't and they wont.
At the end of the day they will have to continue to have some natural listings on page one otherwise personalisation for a particular user/browser will become stale. Our job is to find ways to make sure that we are in the top #n (n will vary depending on market) so that we have a chance of getting the share of traffic to make our sites successful. We will also need to find the metrics that make Google think that our sites are what users want. This probably means actually making our sites what users want together with methods to ensure that Google picks up the value vibe. We need to find ways to get people to return, not bounce, stay a while etc. For example if you have a high traffic page that does everything a searcher wants on one page you might have to look to split that up and give them a good reason to go to a page 2 on that subject so that Google doesn't think they bounced. We will need to lead the algorithm by the hand so that it understands how good our site is.
The amount of traffic will not change and the best sites can still look forward to their fair share of that traffic we just need to work out how to make it exceedingly bleeding obvious to Google that users think "this is a good site".
In the longer term I can see the new web democracy being users voting with their eyes and fingers. PageRank was supposed to be about sites voting for each other with the kind of data Google is collecting and the kind of analysis they can do it is easy to see that this change could, over time, lead to users voting for sites and for that data to be coalesced into a population vote for a site.
I can see lots of good in all of this, lots that I don't like but at the bottom of it all I hate the decision to force this on users and the breach of privacy that this represents.
Cheers
Sid
Consider the often used example of the term "football" used by different people to mean entirely different sports. I remember talks at conferences as far back as 2001 when representatives of nearly all the then search engines stated their aim was to try and deliver the most revelant results to people searching on that type of term.
There were, in my opinion, two reasons behind this. The first was to give users a better search experience and the second, less obvious reason, was to give more "real-estate" to advertisers - thus boosting revenues to the SEs and giving advertisers a better return by targeting potential clicks in a better defined manner - as opposed to the "scatter-gun" approach that then pertained.
Over the years, simple efforts to provide these sorts of results were done by refining geo-targeting, first towards countries and then to regions and even cities. It did, for many users, provide them with more relevant results. It also increased the "real-estate" for people wanting to bid on terms significantly - because instead of only having 10 or so sponsored results available on the first page for a particular term it was 10*number of countries and/or number of regions. Infinitely more space for more advertisers for the same key phrases.
Then the great buy-up/integration of analytics and other entities that recorded people's demographics started. Yahoo and MSN had a head start with their e-mail and IM type applications. The advantage this gave was seen when Microsoft's AdCenter first launched allowing advertisers to chose not only what region they wanted to target for a campaign but specific demographics that you wanted to target.
Google didn't have such a wealth of existing information from their properties and had to glean it in other ways - hence the toolbar, which when downloaded kept all your surfing history (unless you opted out), things like Gmail and then just using Google (and being registered).
To me it was fairly obvious Google (and probably the other SEs) were recording individual IP activity in order to try and provide more "relevant" results to all surfers, regardless of if they were frequent or infrequent users of that particular SE.
My feeling is that, in Google's case, through their overwhelming domination of search in certain market, the recording of this data has resulted in personalized search occuring as almost a side effect of this corrolation of IP data and they are now admitting that fact!
So, not so much a new algo, but the admission that they hold so much "anonymous" data - but tied to an individual IP that unless repressed, it will lead to pretty complete personalized results.
So do I like the intrusive nature of this? No but, to a certain extent, all of us in this industry live and breath analytics and user behaviour. Now it is being taken to its' logical ends unless user reaction causes a back-down.
The gamble here from Google and other SEs considering this course is that the perceived benefits to users, advertisers (and through their satisfaction at better targeting and through the diffusion of results more opportunities for smaller local advertisers - a better revenue for shareholders) will outweigh the negative issues.
Time will tell - but this doesn't strike me as an "evil empire" abusing their position, but a logical progression of developments started many years ago by all SEs but pushed forward first by Google, simply because they have the most information to produce these kinds of results - and are willing to admit it!
Having said all that, I've switched to Bing - and banned the Google Toolbar in my business years ago! But that is purely because I want to try and make some attempts to preserve my privacy when I know I am being watched. But at least Google have told us. Who knows who is recording my every move without telling me!
I was on another thread and typed something into Google and nearly fell off my chair when one of my sites came up number 1. No way should it rank that high for the term entered. It's akin to having a site about "news" and suddenly find you are number one for that search term.
I then did the same search on Firefox for the term and my site was way down the SERPS, where it belongs for that term. I keep Firefox cookies deleted after every browsing session in case cookies get in the way of the results.
Is it simply cookies?
The whole thing is a pile of rubbish and should be binned - speaking as someone who both uses G to see how their site is doing and for general web searches. I hadn't noticed the 'Web history' link at the top till the other day but had wondered why G's search results for anything were so rubbish lately. So bad that I have resorted to using Bing to find anything.
Bin it Google it's useless and I for one do not want you to store any info about what I search for or when I search for it.
2) Google is not as naive as you think, to assume one person per PC.
3) Personalized search is the way forward, in my opinion, for the reasons explained: people have individual interests, nobody wants to see who optimizes better for "manchester united", like it's been for 10+ years now. THAT kind of SEO is DEAD(see a Shoemoney post that talks about that).
4) Google has WAY too much market share, THAT is the main issue, not personalized search, IMHO. Too much power, taking over too much of the web, monitoring too much personal info, taking in too much and giving back what their budget allows is NOT a FREE world wide web, it's an empire project that MUST not go forth.
Also it appears that it isn't just clicks that provide influence (sorry if this came up before). For example, I searched for red and white widgets and got a red and white widget site. Then I searched for brown widgets, and the same read and white widget site popped up #1. I then tried various colored widgets and the same site kept popping up #1... even when I searched for just widgets. Different machine showed different results. Can anyone else verify this?
btw ..what we each may speculate that the other search engines were probably doing is entirely irrelevant and unproven ..
you shouldn't ask everyone to forgive one person for say "car stealing" because someone else was probably doing the same "car stealing"..in your opinion ..
yes your honour .."I did it ..but let me off because my mate says that someone else was probably doing the same thing somewhere" ..
wouldn't fly in a real court ..shouldn't even be launched as an attempt at a defense in the court of public opinion
GORG are doing this is a fact ..what others MS or Yahoo etc were probably doing is pure speculation and IMO is being reintroduced constantly to this thread as a diversion/red herring ..to try to get GORG off the hook and us talking about something else.
This probably means actually making our sites what users want together with methods to ensure that Google picks up the value vibe.
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The Google staff also knows that opt-in, not opt-out, is the most user-friendly default - as well as the most respectful. So the user satisfaction data they were seeing from signed-in and personalized results must be amazingly strong for them to force the default like this.
Said another way, this particular move is NOT designed to collect more data than before - because it doesn't do that. It's designed to improve end-user satisfaction. I can only infer that the average user must be even more clueless about search than I thought.
All the things that have been driving me crazy about Google results recently must actually be helping the majority find what they are looking for, and doing so in a major way.
The Google staff also knows that opt-in, not opt-out, is the most user-friendly default - as well as the most respectful.
they did this because not enough people were opting in ..and so as they wanted to aggregate the data and needed more of it in the mix they decided to just take it ..
Said another way, this particular move is NOT designed to collect more data than before - because it doesn't do that.
It's designed to improve end-user satisfaction.
All the things that have been driving me crazy about Google results recently must actually be helping the majority find what they are looking for, and doing so in a major way.
I find the fact that you as a senior admin here keep pushing the exact same line as GORG and their senior management on their disregard of all decency and privacy the most disturbing thing I've seen here since I joined WebmasterWorld ..
