Google's Personalized Search: is it real?

Mon 22 February 2010 14:55, Barry Adams

Back in December of last year Google announced it would be rolling out its Personalized Search feature to all its users. Searchcowboys has written before about the pro's and cons of Personalized Search, but what has the true impact been so far?

Two months on one thing stands out most: change has been minimal. On the websites I manage we've seen no major shift in clickthrough behaviour on search engine traffic.

Keyword ranking metrics had already been mostly obsolete thanks to local and universal search, and with Social Search also adding to the mix on SERPs on top of personalized search, we can now perhaps finally say goodbye to keyword rankings as a valid SEO metric. (Or can we?)

But is personalized search really such a big deal as most of us first assumed? Privacy issues aside, is personalized search really having any impact at all on SERPs?

Many SEO blogs have conducted their own experiments on what exactly personalized search does. While far from conclusive these tests (SEOmoz, Huomah, SEO 2.0) do seem to show that the effect of personalized search is minimal at best, or perhaps even entirely non-existent.

Two months doesn't seem like a very long time, so perhaps we're jumping to conclusions. But two months can be an eternity in the fast-moving realm of the Internet. Is personalized search just another hype? Is Google just being careful with the roll-out? Is it even active at all? Or are we as SEOs simply not clear on what exactly personalized search does and doesn't do?

For now the old adage seems to be proved true once again: 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'

<Paid Linking is Dying. Time to M...

New Tools in Raven SEO Toolbox>

Comments (1)

- Dennis Sievers
- [website]
Hi Barry,

I agree. Personal search is 'hot', and on a larger scale it IS a huge innovation / movement in our market. But on a user level, changes in searchresults are limited. Top 10's are not truly changing that much. The real difference is that Google might give you another top 10 for a search query, based on historical information.

Tue 23 Feb 2010, 09:18

Comment

Baidu heatmap

Fri 20 Jan 2012, Kelly Ge

0 comments

There is nothing special about heatmap. You can easily find one and use it for your site, and many like it, for it is easy to get an idea on browsing behavior of visit...... read more

Baidu can index Weibo (Chinese T...

Fri 9 Dec 2011, Kelly Ge

0 comments

Be careful! Your comments on Weibo can be indexed and searched by others on Baidu. How can it happen? Baidu Open data makes it possible. I have introduced Baidu open d...... read more

Baidu index -- Baidu keyword ana...

Tue 19 Apr 2011, Kelly Ge

1 comment

Baidu index -- Baidu keyword analysis tool

Baidu index is used for keywords research and monitoring search trends in China. You can check the "media exposure" and "users concern" on certain keyword in the past ...... read more

Google Percolator

Tue 28 Sep 2010, Mark Farragher

3 comments

Google has rolled out its new search platform Caffeine in June, but the company has been a little tight lipped about the implementation details. We were told that Caff...... read more