Google's search results are undergoing their most radical transformation ever, as a new "Search Plus Your World" format begins rolling out today. It finds both content that's been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set of listings. The change is live now, though not everyone will see it until it fully launches over the next few days. It's only for those signed-in to Google.com and searching in English. You'll know when it happens, because Google will alert you with a message like this above your search results: The new system will [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Google+ | Google: Personalized Search | Google: Search Plus Your World | Google: Social Search | Top News

Good morning! Welcome to day two of our SMX East Conference in New York City. We're beginning today with a keynote conversation with Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, a book in which Pariser argues that search personalization leads to users being unaware of viewpoints and opinions that are different than their own. We should be getting started at the top of the hour, so feel free to refresh and/or come back to follow along with the discussion. Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan will be taking care of duties guiding the conversation. Chris has just introduced Eli and we're beginning [...]

Related Topics: Google: Critics | Google: Personalized Search | Search Features: Search History & Personalization | SEM Industry: Conferences

Google announced that the blocking sites feature introduced in the US based results in March this year, is now available internationally. Google's Johannes Henkel said "starting today, you can now block sites on most Google domains." Here is a picture of blocking Matt Cutts blog in Google France: As discussed before, there is a dashboard to manage sites that you block. So you can add new blocked sites, remove sites you blocked and so on. Google did not specify which international Google properties this does not work on, but they did say it should work on "most Google domai [...]

Related Topics: Google: Personalized Search | Google: Search Customization | Google: SEO | Google: Web History & Search History | Google: Web Search

Google has added a pair of features today that make Google News a little more personal. First, the "News for you" section of Google News now includes stories based on your previous Google News activity. If you click on a lot of articles about a certain topic, this section will begin to show more articles on that topic. Second, the right column has a new feature called "Recommended Sections" that also uses your news history to suggest new topics to add to your customized Google News homepage. These personalized news features can be disabled by using the "Standard US Edition" of Goo [...]

Related Topics: Google: News | Google: Personalized Search | Search Features: Search History & Personalization | Top News

New research designed to analyze Google's personalized search results and make the process the search engine uses more transparent has generated interesting and controversial findings. The study examined a number of commonly held notions about personalization, including the idea that personalization is subtle, that it can often surface more long-tail results, and that personalization is based exclusively on a person's past search and web browsing behavior. Among the key conclusions: Despite personalized results, for most people search quality has been declining, results are less personal, refl [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Personalized Search | Google: Web History & Search History | Magazine | Top News | Weekender