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.
Now the personalised results are available for logged out users, which I agree it can hurt, but since those are based on the user's search history it seems to me that maybe 2-3 results will be personalised and the rest organic.
If say the first two results are from the history, this means that the user has visited these pages quite often (and knows their content) and according to my "way" of logic, he will be likely to visit pages ranked below the top spots more often than previously.
Don't see this as much as a drastic change as most participants on this topic. I.e. I don't think we should expect a drastic drop in traffic as a result of this new Google feature.
Its a kind of early Christmas present for the stupid site owner.
Cheers
Sid
Yes, every one noticed WHEN LOGGED IN - but few login in intentionally. It is only because they are logged into some other g service.
Yep, that's what ol' GOOG has said, all along. It's "sort of" simple... I've jumped through hoops to stop using it on my Safari toolbar.
Too bad lots more webmasters haven't "stopped using it" as the search engine on their websites. GOOG is pretty deeply embedded in the WWW, has been for many years. Almost analogous to AOL and other bloatware on fresh Windoze installs.
GOOG now serves me before I ask: aren't they bound to bring the wrong cookies for dessert, sometimes? BWC. GOOG does know evil.
Not totally. As with anything that adds a complicted element to the mix, people who are aware of it will do better than those who won't. True, massive sites (most especially Amazon) will benefit hugely from this at the expense of niche authority sites, but well SEO-ed niche authority sites will benefit at the expense of the know-nothing-about-seo sites.
It just became more important to attract search traffic that has no monetary value because that will help you rank better for money terms. That part of this is like a gift from God to seos.
Charlie who builds a site that offers cheap hotel rooms to business travelers with tiny expense accounts will not be found in the beginning UNLESS he spends significant amounts on ADWORDS
Charlie better hope he doesn't have any affiliate ads on that cheap hotel rooms site of his, because if he does his AdWords account will be wacked in short order!
So things just got better for you re readers who already like your site...
This is sort of how I see it.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that Google historically has been a hit and miss search engine because of its constant tweaking to its algorithm.
Typical users do not seem to use the browsers bookmark function for whatever reason, and instead just Google using the term they expect will give them the site they want on the first page. (using the term they first used to find the site)
That works for them for a while...
But with the ever changing algorithm, ranks fluctuate and all of a sudden the site they want to visit is not where they "expected" it to be, that causes them to search again, but this time append the site name or part of the URL to the search term till they find the site they want.
This tells Google that when this particular person searches the term "Blue Widgets" (which they do a few times a week) there actually looking for the site MyBlueWidgets.com because that's the site they always visit after searching that term. (regardless of where it is on the first page)
So Google now knows what they want because of there past history and will place that site at the top of the results for them whenever they search for that term. (How can this be bad)
The next time Google do any tweaking, this person is not going to get frustrated because the site they want to visit has vanished from the first page.
To assume Google will start ranking MyBlueWidgets.com at the top of the results when the same person searches for "Green Widgets" is just that, an assumption.
If Google were to fill the first page with sites you have visited in the past for any query, then people will leave them in droves. I doubt they are that silly.
I believe this will be used for those that search the same term repeatedly then visit the same site repeatedly. But that's just my opinion and have no qualifications to back it up.
Sharing my opinion.
Cheers
James
Bing/Live/MSN has been more personalized search focused than Google from day one. They geolocate searches like [astronomy] and [genghis khan]. Bing would do this in a second if they were technically more competent. There is no savior on this isue coming from Redmond.
[edited by: davelms at 11:19 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2009]
