Search Engine Land » Google: Personalized Search

Page To Anti-Trust Critics: “Actions” & Google+ Are An Essential Part Of Search

Danny Sullivan — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:00:28 +0000

Google’s taken flak over the past year from critics about how the company has been integrating actions such as booking flights or hotels into its search results. It’s also faced criticisms that it is leveraging its search dominance to build its Google+ social network. I found it notable that Google CEO Larry Page, in his “2012 Update from the CEO“ letter, essentially pushed back against both criticisms.

Page doesn’t say he’s attacking these criticisms in the update. That’s my own reading between-the-lines. But nothing in the letter would have been presented without a good reason. I think both areas got addressed as part of Google’s continued positioning that what it’s doing with Google+ and with task completion isn’t polluting its search results nor acting anti-competitively but rather simply evolving search.

Google’s Push With Google+

Google’s held nothing back in trying to make Google+ successful. The company, which used to never advertise on television, now routinely seems to have commercials pushing its social network. Speaking of pushing, in January, as part of Search Plus Your World, it pushed its own ads further down in its search results to allow for a “People and Pages on Google+” box to appear.

Those are just two examples among many where Google has been putting its weight behind Google+. But doing this has opened it up to some accusations. Is Google using its dominance in search to unfairly jumpstart its own social network? Is Google ruining its search results by shoving too much Google+ content within them?

The head of Google’s search efforts, Amit Singhal, has previously argued that Google+ is an important part of advancing Google’s search quality. I believe he’s generally right.

Both Google and Bing are using social signals — and need to use them — as a way to further improve results. My story from February, When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building, explains more about this and the challenge in getting the balance right.

Google+ Needed To Improve Search

Page’s letter adds a further defense. He wrote:

Understanding identity and relationships can also help us improve search.

In other words, for Google to improve, it needs to understand who people really are on the web, plus what they care about. That’s where Google+ comes in, a way for it to better understand relationships as well as who is authoring content. Google had such profiles even before Google+ existed, and Google+ is a continuation of this.

Expect this also to be used as a defense of why Google+ need to exist regardless of players like Facebook or Twitter. Page is reemphasizing that profiles are part of search. They’re not just some social add-on. They’re a key ingredient that any search engine needs.

Fear Not The Personalization

Page also pushes back on concerns about personalization:

Imagine how much better search would be if we added… you. Say you’ve been studying computer science for awhile like me, then the information you need won’t be that helpful to a relative novice and vice versa. If you’re searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person—not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care about.

Recall that we just had a survey showing that Americans apparently consider personalized search not just to be bad but also an invasion of their privacy: Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion.

The problem is, no one is going to have a positive reaction if you ask if search engines should “track” what people search for to personalize results for them, in my opinion. But if you rephrase that question such as:

If you’ve searched for “travel,” then immediately search for “spain,” do you think it makes sense for search engines to look at both and give you results about “spanish travel?”
If you’re searching for football in the UK, do you think search engine should look at your location and provide information about UK football — soccer — rather than the NFL?

There are very good reasons that personalization can be helpful, as I wrote before. But personalization doesn’t sound good when it’s not presented along with real, helpful examples.

Page tries at this, but I didn’t think it was that successful. Google’s Singhal did a better take late last year. But make no mistake. Personalization is being mentioned by Page to help prop it up as an essential, helpful thing for Google to be doing.

Search Needs Social & If Other Social Networks Don’t Want To Share…

Page also argues that Google+ itself is an essential part of search and gets in a swipe at Facebook and Twitter:

Privacy considerations certainly limit the information that can be shared between platforms—even if the third parties hosting it were willing to work with Google, which hasn’t always been the case.

Google+ helps solve this problem for us because it enables Google to understand people and their connections….

This kind of next-generation search in which Google understands real-world entities—things, not strings—will help improve our results in exciting new ways. It’s about building genuine knowledge into our search engine.

As I said, Google’s come under fire that it’s favoring its own social network. Page effectively pushes back with a critical distinction. Google+ isn’t social; Google+ is part of search. Google needs to have it to run its search engine, and you can expect to hear that argument again and again, especially as the FTC explores Google+ as part of its on-going anti-trust investigation of Google.

You can also expect to hear Google continue to argue, as it has done already, that it is open to including social network’s data. Of course, there are very good reasons why Facebook and Twitter don’t want to share with Google. A Proposal For Social Network Détente, which I wrote earlier this year, explains more about this and some potential cooperation points all around.

Actions & Fair Search Results

Page moves on to a section called “Taking Actions” that especially seems designed to push back on accusations that Google is favoring its own services over those of competitors.

A good search engine should provide the best results possible, not just those that are in its own interests. Some have argued that Google, by showing results from its own shopping search engine or travel search engine, is favoring itself over that user interest as well as competitors. There’s even an argument that doing so violates anti-trust laws, given Google’s dominance in search.

To understand these arguments more, I highly recommend the stories below for more background:

In most cases, I find the arguments against Google to be laughable, on the order of someone objecting that the New York Times doesn’t show the entertainment section from the Los Angeles Times, therefore government regulation is required.

It gets more complicated in some situations, especially where Google properties are destinations (such as YouTube or Google+) as opposed to be outbound-pointing search engines (such as Google Maps or Google Shopping).

Is Search Also Task Completion?

It gets even more complicated where Google is allowing for direct transactions to happen, such as booking flights or hotels. That’s one reason you saw companies like TripAdvisor and Expedia make formal anti-trust complaints to the European Union about Google last week.

Both companies, along with others including Microsoft, are part of the FairSearch group that singles out Google as being anti-competitive, even though many of the exact same complaints can be pointed at Microsoft-backed Bing. You can book hotels and flights directly at Bing, with Kayak getting preferred placement through a deal.

Page makes an important pivot to say that search isn’t just getting links to information but that it’s also about conducting actions right within the search results or getting direct answers within them:

In the early days of Google you would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and you would move on fairly happily. Today you want more. If you search for “weather san francisco”, chances are you want… the weather in San Francisco right there on the results page, not another click or two away. So that’s what we now provide

Truly great search is all about turning your needs into actions in the blink of an eye.

Page isn’t the first to say such things. Bing has been pushing on the idea that it’s a “decision engine” since Microsoft relaunched its search engine in 2009. It really hasn’t delivered on that promise of doing direct actions much more than Google, I’d say. Both have direct answers, which were commonly provided as far back as 2004 among the major search engines. As for task completion, both Google and Bing offer this in relatively limited ways.

Task completion — actions — are likely to grow, however. As they already have, it has been Google that’s come under pressure for potentially locking out competitors. Google Flight Search, made possible by the ITA acquisition that attracted so much scrutiny, as well as Google Hotel Finder, both especially stand out. Page pulls them into the protective umbrella of being part of core search, in his update:

Last year, for example, we welcomed ITA Software to the Google family. They have strong relationships with the airline industry, and using that data we can now provide more relevant results for travel queries. This means that if you search for “flights from chicago to los angeles”, you get a list of the most relevant flights with prices, and you can book directly with the airline—or click on an ad for an online travel agency.

We’re also experimenting with a feature called Hotel Finder, which enables you to compare prices and book a hotel room right from the results page. It’s all about speeding things up so users can get on with the things that matter in their lives.

See, there’s no anti-trust wrong-doing here, nothing to see. This is just all part of Google being a good search engine, Page seems to be saying. Whether regulators believe that remains to be see. But Google, which has already been arguing many of these points, seems to be refreshing its playbook with Page’s letter.

Video: Google’s Susan Wojcicki Keynotes SMX West 2012

Matt McGee — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:34:15 +0000

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s SVP of Advertising, spoke at our recent SMX West search marketing conference in a keynote conversation with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. The conversation covered many different topics — not just the advertising side of Google where Susan is most heavily involved — from privacy issues to mobile marketing to how Google started in Wojcicki’s garage.

While we already provided coverage of the keynote via Greg Sterling’s live blog of the conversation, we also have several video clips that our readers may have missed — and that attendees may want to revisit.

Susan Wojcicki On Google+ & Personalized Search

Susan Wojcicki On Google’s Privacy Policy Changes

Susan Wojcicki On The Creep Factor & “Do Not Track”

Susan Wojcicki: Mobile Is Finally Here!

Susan Wojcicki On Why Google Buys Companies

Susan Wojcicki On Hosting Google In Her Garage

Susan Wojcicki’s Background

Susan Wojcicki: The Whole Interview

Click here to view the embedded video.

Susan Wojcicki: Audience Q&A (several questions on a variety of topics)

You can also see these videos and more on the Search Marketing Expo YouTube channel.

Survey Paradox: People Like Google But Not What It’s Doing

Greg Sterling — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:06:31 +0000

Last week the Pew Internet Project released findings of a survey on search, personalization and targeted advertising. In a nutshell, survey respondents had a very positive view of search and the quality of search results. Yet the majority gave an unequivocal thumbs down to search personalization (and behavioral targeting). This isn’t necessarily a contradiction or paradox in the abstract, but it is when you consider that the most popular search engine is moving aggressively in a direction most people say they don’t want search to go.

Here’s our earlier coverage of the survey:

To recap the basic findings, Pew reported that search usage was highly popular and essentially tied with email as the most common online activity — and still quite a bit more popular than social networking according to these findings.

Google’s US market share is just over 66 percent according to the most recent comScore data. However when asked which search engine they used most often, 83 percent of Pew respondents said Google.

The upbeat survey findings took an abruptly negative turn when Pew started asking people about search personalization and data mining. Two-thirds (65 percent) of users said search personalization was a “bad thing.” Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) said that data mining for the purpose of personalizing search results was “not okay.”

What’s fascinating here is that the public, at least in terms of these survey findings, doesn’t seem to be associating Google with any of the “not okay” things they don’t like about personalization and ad targeting. In fact there seems to be a complete disconnect between survey respondents’ positive views of search, and by extension Google, and disapproval of personalization and data mining.

Pew didn’t insert Google’s (or Bing’s) names into the questions about personalization or data mining to see if these activities would harm brand perception and usage. Pew simply asked about data mining in the abstract. However it would have been very interesting to see the answers to those more specific questions.

Google has met with intensifying criticism in the recent past over several privacy related incidents and missteps (e.g., Cookiegate, privacy policy changes). But the general US public seems not to have noticed. Google is probably assuming that any furor over SPYW and privacy will simply blow over and it won’t suffer any brand or image “penalty” or consumer defections to Bing. That may be a correct assumption — although the issue of online privacy is not going away any time soon.

My guess is that Google will generally ignore the Pew survey findings (though legislators probably won’t) and continue, full speed ahead, on its present personalization course.

Related Entries

Pew Report: 65% View Personalized Search As Bad; 73% See It As Privacy Invasion

Danny Sullivan — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:00:08 +0000

Personalized search? Both Google and Bing will tell you that it provides better results. But two-thirds say they don’t care. They view personalized search as a “bad thing,” a new survey finds. Nearly three-quarters also view gathering data to personalize results to be a privacy invasion.

The findings come out of a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Around 2,000 adults in the US were questioned between January 20 and February 19 of this year as part of a wide-ranging poll about search engine use, though fewer may have answered particular questions.

Personalized Search: A Bad Thing

People were asked how they’d feel if a search engine tracked what they searched for, then used that information to personalize their future search results:

Rather than a straight yes/no option, the choices gave some context. From the chart above about views on personalized search:

65% said it was a “bad thing” since, as the response said, “it may limit the information you get online and what search results you see”
29% said it was a “good thing” because “it gives you results that are more relevant you.”

By Demographics

The survey also broke down responses to the question about personalized search by age, income level and race:

Generally speaking, the older someone was, the less they agreed with personalized search. The percentage of those who said it was bad by age group:

18-29: 56%
30-49: 67%
50+: 70%

A similar pattern was true by income group. The more you earn, the more you’re likely to consider personalized search to be bad. The percentages disagreeing with it by income:

Less than $30,000: 45% (the most favorable of all groups)
$30,000 to $74,999: 68%
$75,000: 75%

Whites were far more likely to disagree with it than Blacks/Hispanics as a combined group (70% to 50%).

Invasion Of Privacy

The survey also asked the same question but with a different set of possible answers, these designed to tell if tracking searches was deemed a privacy invasion:

Again, rather than a straight yes/no option, there was context to each choice:

73% overall said they were “Not OK” with personalized search, since they felt it was an invasion of their privacy
83% of those 50+ viewed it as a privacy invasion
69% of those 18-29 viewed it as as an invasion
68% of those 30-49 viewed it as an invasion

Some History & Perspective On Personalized Search

There’s no way to tell if all the attention personalized search has had lately is generating more negative views than in the past. That’s because Pew hasn’t surveyed views on personalized search before, to my knowledge. But those surveyed now clearly did not like it.

The new findings will likely give fresh ammunition to those who oppose personalized search, especially as conducted by Google. It follows on another survey last month that found largely negative views.

However, it’s worth noting that personalized search has been the norm at Google for over two years and at Bing for just over a year. Even if you’re not logged into either search engine, they’re personalizing your results.

The fact that most people haven’t objected, or gone out of their way to prevent even logged-out personalization from happening, probably means that they really don’t understand the ways that personalization can be helpful. Last November, Google had a very good post explaining some of the benefits.

Yes, I know — it’s Google, of course they’re going to push the benefits. But so does Bing. Yes, I know, Bing wants to personalize results just to make money off searchers in the same way as Google. True.

But it’s also true that some personalization can indeed be helpful, especially in a web full of crud. Just over a year ago, people were screaming that Google’s search results were being overrun by garbage, which resulted in the Panda Update. But filtering can only do so much. Personalization is also a useful signal.

Preventing Fears From Becoming Real

The challenge is when the search engines go to far. Google’s Search Plus Your World launched earlier this year dramatically increased the amount of personalized results that were visible (though ironically, it also made it far easier to turn off the personalization that had been happening since December 2009).

Google faced pretty severe backlash in the mainstream and tech press, though regular users really didn’t seem to notice or care about the change.

My view tends to be that no one likes the idea of personalization. There’s fear that you’ll be stuck in what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble. Or that you’ll be in that bad feedback loop like at Amazon, where you get terrible recommendations based on an odd one-time purchase. And there are real privacy worries about having all your searches — some of which can be intensely personal — recorded.

I think when you ask anyone about personalization, the reaction they have will be far more negative than in their actual routine. If they’re educated more about it, if you give them more context, a knee-jerk “it’s bad” response can often turn into a “maybe.” I’ve seen this happen when I’ve spoken with people on the topic.

That’s not to take away that people do have real concerns. It just remains to be seen if those concerns on paper turn into walking away from Google and Bing to the likes of Duck Duck Go or other “private” search engines we covered recently. Certainly if the major search engines don’t show care to these concerns, that may increase the odds.

More On Personalized Search

And here are some related background pieces on personalized search:

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:30:48 +0000

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 perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.

However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

The new format and features will also likely cause Google to come under renewed fire that it is leveraging its search engine to favor its own content and crowd out competitors.

Below, a detailed look at what’s involved with Search Plus Your World, from how it works to some of the issues it raises.

Before: Personalized & Social Search Results Separate

Google has had personalized results since June 2005, results from across the web that are given a ranking boost because they are deemed especially of interest to someone, based on their personal behavior and interests. Without the boost, these results might not have made it into the top listings for a particular search.

Personalized results were expanded and presented in a new way in February 2007. Then, in December 2009, you no longer had to opt-in to receive personalized results. They were enabled by default for everyone, to some degree, even if you weren’t signed-in to Google.

Separately, Google has had social search results since October 2009. These are also personalized listings but ones based on the people you know, rather than your personal behavior. They’ve also been given a ranking boost.

Initially segregated from “regular” listings, Google’s social search results were blended into regular results in Feburary 2011 and expanded to include not just content created by those you know but also content shared by them through a variety of social networks.

Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears.

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful,” said Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, when I talked with him about the new features.

You’ll know that personalized results are appearing when you see one or both of the indicators below:

The arrow on the left points to a message that, in this example, says that there are “50 personal results and 419,000 other results” that have been found. Some of those 50 results will be blended into the first page of results being shown.

The second arrow highlights a new toggle that Google has introduced, something that many of those who do search engine optimization have wanted for ages. It allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results.

I’ll cover more about the toggle in a bit. When the button with a person icon is shown dark, that means results are being personalized.

Private Content In Your Web Results

To summarize, personalized results include:

Listings from the web
Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior
Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line is the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web. Here’s an example:

In this example provided by Google (complete with its arrow), you can see how one of the photos is showing up with the note: “You shared this – Limited.”

This is a real life example of how personalized search is working for Singhal. He shared this photo of his dog, Chikoo, on Google+ in a limited manner, rather than with the entire world. The other photos of the dog that you can see, including one from his wife, Shilpa, were also privately shared.

Before today’s change, a Google search wouldn’t have found any of these photos when Singhal, his wife or anyone he’s shared them with searched for “chikoo,” which is a fruit. That’s because since the photos were private, Google couldn’t see them.

Instead, if Singhal or others with access to these photos wanted to find them, they would have had to use the completely separate Google+ Search.

The new feature will also work to find Google+ posts that have been shared in a limited manner, or for Google Picasa photos shared privately.

Slightly confusing, you can drill-down into the results to get what Google also calls “Personal Results,” which is a way to get just content from Google+ or Picasa. Remember this from above?

Clicking on the “personal results” link (or “Personal” in the options under “More Search Tools” in the left-column) brings back pure personal results.

No Content From Facebook Or Others, But Google Open To This

I’ve no doubt many people will find it useful to do one search to locate both private and public information at once. However, one of the biggest depositories of private information these days — if not the biggest — is Facebook.

Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

Why are these others missing?

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Perhaps Search Plus Your World will prove the carrot or stick that Google’s been after for years to get Facebook to share its data with Google. If the new feature takes off, searchers may wonder why they can’t find privately shared information from their Facebook friends easily on Google.

Then again, Facebook could decide to push back by beefing up its own search features. Currently, Facebook partners with Bing, allowing Bing to personalize its search results for searchers based on what their Facebook friends like.

However, only publicly shared content gets personalized like this. Potentially, Facebook and Bing could work more closely to come up with their own version of Search Plus Your World. That could happen on Bing, or it could happen within Facebook itself.

To date, Facebook’s not spent much time trying to refine its own search results. The primary reason seems to be that the company has repeatedly said that most of the Facebook-based searches it sees are to find people, not to find information about broad topics as happens at Google.

Only You & Those You Share With See Private Content

When Google first showed me Search Plus Your World, a part of me felt unsettled and uncomfortable. As I’ve thought about it more, I think it’s because it feels weird to see “private” content appearing in seems like Google’s “public” search results.

Of course, personalized results aren’t Google’s public results. They are results personalized just for the person viewing them. If private content has been shared with those people, that’s visible. If it hasn’t been, then it’s not.

Google’s also not making it possible to search for anything that you couldn’t already search for before. As I explained, private content shared on Google+ could be found with a Google+ search. Google’s really just making Google+ Search one of its Universal Search sources, in some ways.

In other words, you can search on Google and find matches from Google News, Google Images, Google Video and other Google search services without having to go to them individually. Google+ Search is now another one of those integrated services.

Will It Lead To Concerns?

As said, the ability to search for private content on Google+ isn’t new. However, I wonder if having it integrated into Google’s search results itself might cause some surprises and issues for both Google and its users.

Consider sites selling counterfeit goods. When Google links to these, it gets blamed for promoting counterfeiting, almost as if it created the sites. What’s really happening is that Google comes under fire for giving sites visibility.

Now Google’s going to give greater visibility to private information. Things that people may have forgotten sharing with others will begin to show up serendipitously through ordinary Google searches. Some might not like this, if material they’ve happily forgotten suddenly seems to reappear. Google might take the blame, even though the sharing was done by others.

It might be similar to some of the concerns that came up recently with Facebook Timeline. It’s not that the material Timeline lists wasn’t out there before. But by organizing it, forgotten things are brought back up, as this New York Times article explained well.

Another issue is that it’s very easy with Google+ (as it is with Facebook and Twitter) for someone with access to private content to reshare it publicly. Someone searching on Google, then coming across an unexpected photo or post from a friend, might reshare it to the world.

All this could happen without the search integration. Maybe none of it will be much of an issue at all. But these are concerns that come to mind.

One solution might be an option to exclude your shared content from being searchable. This is something that can be done with public content on the web. You can tell Google or other search engines not to include published material in their search listings. Perhaps Google needs to offer the same for private content, as well (it doesn’t currently).

Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not

Google’s been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping.

And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.

“We’ve been working on it for a year, very hard to get it right,” Singhal said, of dealing with the security issues. “It’s just a hard technical problem that we bit off, and it was something that we could not launch until we had it right.”

The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection you’re using.

Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.

Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. It’s a false justification. Indeed, the move might make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers.

Potentially, people are going to search for even more private things than they ever did before. Potentially, they’re going to click on ad links and pass these private search terms to advertisers.

Today’s change does nothing to change my view that Google needs to revisit the referrer blocking and either make it a block for everyone, including advertisers, or find a better way to filter search terms that get made visibile in various ways.

My post from Sunday explains this in more depth: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Opt-Out, Not Opt-In

Don’t like the idea of personalized search? Disappointingly, Google didn’t go the opt-in route. Instead, you have to deliberately opt-out.

“I think this is a much better experience, at the end of the day,” Singhal said, explaining why the default change was made.

You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.

This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.

Personalized Is The New “Normal”

Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections.

But geographic targeting — which can be really significant – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

More important, with Google heading toward 100 million users on Google+, if a good number of those are active users, then they’re logged in to Google. That means the “normal” results they see are personalized. Personalized results are normal; non-personalized are not.

Google Profiles Get Big Push

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.

For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box, like this:

You can see how for Ben Smith, a little picture of him appears next to the search suggestion for his name, which in turn is a link to his Google+ profile, if it were selected.

This is very similar to how Google Direct Connect works for Google+ Business Pages. The results individuals see are biased toward people in their own social networks, similar to how Facebook works when you search for people there.

In other words, if you searched for a friend who had a common name, you should be shown your actual friend’s Google+ profile, rather than someone you don’t know.

In addition, the search results themselves will devote much more room to displaying material from a Google+ person (and actually have been doing so since November):

In the example above, you can see how Ben Smith’s Google+ profile is listed right within the results, with some of his recent posts shown. He’s a friend of Singhal’s, which is why posts with “Limited” sharing appear. The “Friends” circle on Google+ that Singhal has put him in is also shown.

“For me, it’s going to change my relationship on how I look at Google search,” Singhal told me. “It makes it much easier for me to get to what they [someone he knows or is interested in] were saying or if there are web results I should care about.”

What About Promoting Facebook Profiles Or Even Web Sites?

Still, it’s a lot of room devoted to Google+ profiles. While Facebook’s terms have prevented Google from getting some data, I can’t see any particular reason why the type of direct connect suggestion being shown above — as well as the deep display of content from a Facebook profile page — couldn’t also be done for Facebook, not to mention Twitter.

After all, if Google can do expanded sitelinks for social media profiles like at Quora or Twitter, then expanded profile listings showing some relevant posts from those profiles doesn’t seem that difficult.

Of course, it’s harder to do in the case above since the suggestion is made because Smith is known to be one of Singhal’s friends. But Google will be suggesting some celebrities and famous people even if the searcher hasn’t connected to them yet:

The example above shows how photographer Trey Ratcliff is being suggested, with a link to his Google+ profile, even though Singhal isn’t already connected to him.

That helps Ratcliff build his Google+ following. But what if he preferred that his Facebook profile be given a link? Or a link to his own web site? Google used to do this type of thing back in 2008 and 2009:

See how a search for New York Times used to bring up a link directly to the New York Times within the search box? That seems to have quietly disappeared.

Now something similar is turning up, something so tied to only Google+ that you can bet some of Google’s anti-trust critics are going to have a field day saying the company is pushing itself unfairly. And that’s a valid criticism.

People & Pages Suggestions

In fact, if the anti-trust critics need more ammunition, there’s the last component of what’s being rolled out today, suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow.

These will appear on the right-hand side of search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Below, what a search for “music” might show:

That’s nice promotion for Google+ (and it also underscores yet again why search marketers simply cannot ignore Google+). But there are still many more people on Twitter and Facebook versus Google Plus.

Google should be able to easily figure out what profiles on other social networks might be relevant to searches. That’s Google’s job as a search engine, if it’s going to make these type of recommendations. But only Google+ gets this type of treatment, and it doesn’t feel right.

Wrapping Up

Overall, I like the integration that allows for searching through private and public material. As I’ve said, I think many people will find it useful.

I do think there are some additional privacy controls that could be added, in particular, the ability for people to opt their content out of being found through search, if they want.

But really, more than anything, I’d like to see Google diligently work in the coming weeks to see how it can level the playing field for the other social networks.

Yes, there are things that Facebook or Twitter might not allow, not without Google cutting deals or agreeing to terms it may not want to. But there are also above-and-beyond things that I think Google probably could do to promote these other services in the way it’s doing for Google Plus. I’d like to see that happen.

More Information

Below, a video from Google about the new features:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google also has a blog post up with details here. Coverage from other news sources can be found here on Techmeme. Below, about a billion background stories from us that give more context about today’s change.

Postscript: Since the launch, there’s been quite a debate over whether Google is favoring itself in various ways. Please see our follow-up stories below:

Related Sessions At Our Upcoming Conference

Search Engine Land’s SMX West search marketing conference comes to San Jose from Feb. 28 through March 1. You can bet today’s changes will be a topic of conversation, especially on these panels:

See the full SMX West agenda here. You’ll like the show. Promise. We guarantee it.

SMX East Keynote: A Conversation With Eli Pariser

Matt McGee — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:54:38 +0000

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 with what I guess will be a short speech/presentation of sorts.

Eli: I want to talk about the moral consequences of personalization. He quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “A squirrel dying in front of your house today might be more relevant to you than people dying in Africa.” He wants to talk about the impact of that kind of view of relevance.

He noticed one day that updates from his conservative friends were no longer appearing in his Facebook news feed. He’s liberal-leaning, but likes to read the thoughts of his friends who think differently.

Says he did an experiment asking several friends to Google “Egypt” and send a screenshot of what they see. Shows a side-by-side comparison. “Scott” got all sorts of information about the Democratic revolutions, news about the protests, etc. But “Daniel” didn’t get any of that — he got tips about seeing the pyramids and other travel-related links.

“Increasingly, the web is showing us what it thinks we want to see. It’s not showing us what we need to see, or the world as it is.”

Quotes Eric Schmidt: “It will be hard for people to watch or consume something that has not been tailored for them.”

The “filter bubble” concept — you don’t choose what gets in your filter bubble and, more importantly, you don’t know what’s been edited out.

Personalization algorithms typically look at what you click first. On the Internet, code is the new gatekeeper. It’s making value decisions, but it doesn’t have any value system built in. “It may be showing us what we like, but it’s not showing us what matters.”

We need to make sure that these algorithms don’t focus on a very narrow definition of relevance, where relevance is defined by what we click first. It needs to look at what really matters, things that challenge us, other points of view. The Internet needs to be that thing that connects us to new ways of thinking — that’s not going to happen if we’re all stuck in a little personalized bubble of one.

And that ends his brief speech, and now Danny and Chris are going to chat with him.

DS: Do you find that there’s commonality between search engines?

EP: Says there are some searches that results are common across search engines. Mentions an appearance on a radio show when he was promoting his book. Two of three listeners got same results for “Barack Obama” search, but third got different results focused on the birth certificate issue.

DS: Do people think that everyone should get the same results?

EP: When I was going around, people were shocked that the results aren’t the same for everybody.

CS: Marissa Mayer originally said personalization was very subtle – people wouldn’t notice it at all. She also said it would surface a lot of long-tail pages. And she said that it would only be tied to the individual’s personal history. Is that what’s going on now?

EP: It’s hard to say in any given case what the algorithm is doing. It’s so complex that we don’t know why it’s doing what it does. For some people, it may be subtle. “Overall, I think Google undersells how significant it is. I don’t think Google has malicious motives in doing this. They genuinely think personalized search results will get people coming back to their search engine more. I think they also see this as a way to make it more difficult to deliberately game the results.”

One of the areas where personalization is very strong is vanity searches for your own name. The more you do it, the more the results change.

DS: Don’t you think the bubble gets popped a bit if you democratic site — they might link over to Republican sites and such. Doesn’t that mitigate the personalization?

EP: The more you click around, you may get exposed to other ideas. But you never know when you’re in the bubble. Yahoo personalizes news headlines based on your Yahoo profile, but you never know when that happens.

If it was easier to see when and how these filters are being applied, and be able to turn them on and off, it would be easier to stop them from imposing themselves on you.

CS: This raises a control issue. Should Google be the ones controlling this? Is Google becoming something like a utility that should be regulated?

EP: I think it raises these important questions. The algorithm determines how a billion plus people get where they’re going, but there’s no opacity. The New York Times has an ombudsman for oversight, but there’s nothing similar for Google.

The engineers say that most people don’t understand all this, and Google doesn’t want to make things too complicated.

From a regulatory standpoint, I think there needs to be a reset about the rules on personalization because they were written in 1977.

(Missed question Danny asked about political ads on TV and, I think, disclosure on those ads compared to Internet?)

CS: Wants to go back to discussion of tools. Google offers a variety of tools that show what data it has, but not how it’s being used. Google says this is the “secret sauce” and they can’t reveal too much.

EP: I think the Google Dashboard is a start. It’s not super obvious what Google knows about you, though – it’s a bunch of links. I think Google thinks about this stuff more than other companies, though.

The real challenge is around inferences. Few people realize, if you have a few pieces of data, how far you can extrapolate beyond those pieces of data you can to run ads. If Google is able to target based on inferred data, you should be able to see what’s being inferred about you. Google will show you what it literally knows about you. (He doesn’t say it, but he’s implying that Google won’t reveal what it infers about you.)

It’s not just literally what data you hand over, it’s also about the inferences that your haven’t told anyone about. He mentions Hunch and some of the inferences it can make based on the data users give it.

DS: Asks about the Amazon approach where users can dismiss recommendations. Is that what Google should be doing?

EP: I think Google should give people the tools to understand and play with personalization. See how personalization affects certain queries. “When they want to, these companies are amazingly good at helping people make sense at complex data. Those talents haven’t been turned on this topic.”

Google people say they don’t get many complaints from people about personalization. I tell them that very few people even know about it.

CS: You’re talking to a group of marketers. They rely on this personalization for targeting. So what would you say to them about balance?

EP: My position isn’t that personalization is bad overall, it’s that we need to be careful about how it’s done. Google could do a lot more to explain its philosophy about this, without making it super easy to boost your search rankings. People need to be able to decide when they use these tools.

And with that, the conversation is over. Thanks for following along!

Blocking Sites Within Google Goes International

Barry Schwartz — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:54:43 +0000

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 domains.”

Finally, Google re-confirms that they are using this data as a ranking signal in their algorithm.

Google News Gets A Bit More Personal

Matt McGee — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 23:53:06 +0000

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 Google News (link at the bottom of the home page), by deleting your web history or by logging out of your Google account.

Study Asks, Can You Trust Google’s Personalized Search Results?

Chris Sherman — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:33:37 +0000

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, reflecting more of a standardized Google-centric view than ever before, and that personalized search serves the interests of advertisers more than searchers—even when looking at organic results and excluding paid AdWords listings on a search result page.

The study, by researchers Martin Feuz and Matthew Fuller of the University of London and Felix Stalder of Zurich University of the Arts, focused exclusively on Google given its massive global presence, but the study offers interesting insights into search in general.

A Brief History Of Google Personalized Results

It’s important to note that “personalization” has numerous meanings when it comes to search results. Today, the personalized search results you see are heavily influenced by your own online behavior. But search engines have always aggregated and analyzed data from all users to help improve overall relevancy, using techniques such as collaborative filtering, link popularity and so on. Even PageRank is a form of aggregate analysis, counting “votes” from content creators (links) rather than looking at searcher behavior.

Google initially started tracking search history for users signed in with a Google account in April 2005. In June of that year, it introduced personalized search based on search history as a Google Labs experiment.

Personalized search graduated from Labs to become a feature available to all signed-in users in early 2007. Initially, personalization was based largely on your search history and the results you tended to click on, as well as your Google bookmarks and any content you may have added to your personal iGoogle home page. Google also asserted that personalization was subtle—“What we’ve been doing before is taking two or three results that were suited to your tastes and injecting them. That’s unchanged,” said Google vice president Marissa Mayer at the time.

In April 2007, Google dramatically expanded information it kept about users, going beyond just tracking search history and monitoring everything users did on the web. This hugely increased the data Google could use to fine-tune personalized search results. You could (and still can) opt out of Google collecting your web history and personalizing results by managing your Google account, but you must have an account in the first place to manage this.

In late 2009, Google started personalizing search results for everyone, whether logged into a Google account or not. This means there is no longer any “standard” or “typical” set of Google results for any given query. And somewhat ironically, unless you create and sign in to a Google account, there’s no way to opt out of personalized search results.

Recently, Google has experimented with adding personalization to many of its products and services, including local and product search results (using the location of your IP address or GPS coordinates), its personalized recommendations engine Hotpot and many others. Visit our member library for more on Google’s personalization efforts.

Is Google A Search Engine Or Advertising Company?

The researchers start with the position that Google isn’t really in the business of running a search engine—rather, it’s an advertising company with its “audience” (searchers) as its primary commodity. Just like TV programming, which is expensive to produce and is given away for free to attract an audience, algorithmic search results serve the same purpose, and are “paid for” by advertisers who value the opportunity to promote their goods and services alongside natural search results.

It follows that the more closely targeted advertising is, the more valuable search results are, both to Google and advertisers. Personalizing search results is one way of targeting users. According to the researchers, to personalize results Google builds three-dimensional profiles of users. First, the knowledge person, what you’re interested in based on your queries and click-stream data. Second, the social person—who you’re connected to via email, social networks and other communication tools. Third, the embodied person, your whereabouts as determined by the physical location of your computer or mobile device.

However, the researchers claim that Google is going beyond targeting individual users based on their online behavior, by aggregating personal profiles into statistically related groups. Thus your personalized results will be a combination of what likely interests you, and others who share similar characteristics determined by Google.

Personalizing Results For Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche & Michel Foucault

With every searcher getting personalized results, even seeing different results for the same keyword on occasion, the problem was how to actually detect which results were based on user behavior and which were “unpersonalized” results. To accomplish this, the researchers created three personas in the form of famous philosophers: one each from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The search terms used to generate the web history for each philosopher were based on the indexes of seven books from each philosopher.

After “training sessions” that allowed Google to build up search history for each philosopher, results were compared with an “anonymous user,” defined as someone without login credentials or past history with Google services. This allowed the researchers to compare the philosophers’ profiles to a “generic” set of results (as generic as possible, at any rate, since Google personalizes all search results).

Finally, three sets of search terms were used to compare personalized results. The first group was based on terms from the training set that all three philosophers had in common (e.g. aesthetics, knowledge, virtue, etc.). The second group was based on popular tag words from social bookmarking service Delicio.us (e.g. software, travel, blogs, etc.) The third group was based on Amazon’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases” from three books concerning surveillance, network theory and global democracy.

All told, more than 18,000 queries were submitted during the test period during the testing period in July 2009. Only page one results were considered. (Ironically, though Google has long supported many types of research by outside academics, the researchers reported that Google blocked their queries as looking “similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.”)

The Results: Testing Three Hypotheses

The researchers tested three hypotheses, ultimately rejecting all three based on the data collected.

Hypothesis 1: “Personalization is subtle – at first you may not notice any difference.”

This hypothesis is a direct quote from a 2007 Official Google blog post by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization, and Marissa Mayer, VP Search & User Experience. Translation: You won’t see many personalized results, especially initially. To the contrary, the researchers found that personalized results appeared relatively quickly, and with the Foucault persona receiving on average 6.4 personalized results out of 10 results on the first page.

The researchers note that even these large number of personalized results may not be easily detectable by users, leading them to ask the question “how can they trust the results?” and conclude that most users will not be able to judge the quality of the personalization Google is performing on their search results.

Hypothesis 2: The more user search history is gathered, the more long-tail content is retrieved.

The promise of personalization is that the more Google knows about your interests, the less likely it should be that you’ll get “generic” results and more likely to get results from deeper in the index that more closely match what you’re looking for—the holy grail of finding the needle in the haystack, or what Chris Anderson has called “the long tail.” What this means practically is that some of personalized search results should be surfaced by Google in the set beyond the first 100 results for a search term.

The researchers found that this was not the case, writing “our research finds that Google personal search does not seem to be able to make long-tail content available in a substantial manner.” Why? They offer three possible reasons, none of which may be mutually exclusive:

Personalization is limited to re-ranking already highly ranked results.
Google’s ranking algorithms don’t work well on long tail content.
Personalization isn’t really about search, but fine-tuning the relationship between users and advertisers.

The third conclusion is obviously the most controversial. Google has consistently maintained that it’s all about relevance for searchers, not about making money. But Google has also consistently found ways to make more and more money from advertising, and both searchers and advertisers would not be happy if long tail content was less relevant than “head” content—even if personalization algorithms suggested that the content was appropriate for a given user based on past behavior and presumed intent.

Hypothesis 3:Personalization reflects only an individual user’s past search and web interests.

During testing, the philosophers all received personalized results for some queries even if there was no relationship between search history and search terms. This led the researchers to conclude that Google has created group profiles over time that are associated not just with search terms, but other demographic information and social preferences, such as age, income, preferred vacation destinations and so on. Unlike true personalization, the researchers suggest that this grouping actually reduces diversity (and therefore quality) in search results.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, search engines have long aggregated data to compile statistical profiles of groups. Of all three hypotheses tested by the researchers, this one seems the weakest and least supported by what we know of how search engines work.

Conclusions And Further Questions

The researchers conclude that personalization is “both taking place to a surprising extent but with relatively trivial results, most likely reflecting that we are in the early stages of the process.” They also note that doing this type of research is difficult due to the dynamism with Google as it constantly changes its algorithms, together with the very nature of personalization itself making it difficult to establish any meaningful universal baselines. But it’s important to continue this type of research because as the authors conclude, “Unless we can update our research methods and tools, we cannot adequately address the social and political issues connected with personalisation and the power of search engines more widely. But we urgently need to do this, otherwise the knowledge and power differentials between those on the inside of search engines and those who are mere users of a powerful but opaque machine are bound to grow.”

Citation:

Personal Web searching in the age of semantic capitalism: Diagnosing the mechanisms of personalisation Feuz, Martin, Fuller, Matthew, AND Stalder, Felix. “Personal Web searching in the age of semantic capitalism: Diagnosing the mechanisms of personalisation” First Monday [Online], Volume 16 Number 2 (1 February 2011)

Google Buys Twitter Sentiment Analyzer fflick To Support “Contextual Discovery”

Greg Sterling — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:27:05 +0000

Google has acquired fflick, according to TechCrunch. The price is reportedly $10 million. Is it a talent acquisition, a tool acquisition or both? It’s both.

Using Twitter, the fflick service analyzes and organizes comments about movies: overall, most recent, positive, what your friends have said and so on. This is a very interesting service and it’s easy to see why Google might want it.

Google developed recommendations service HotPot to help improve Local (after the failed attempt to acquire Yelp). And Google has been doing a kind of sentiment analysis of restaurant reviews on Place Pages for some time.

However fflick can be extended across domains and verticals potentially. It could work for products, news, restaurants, TV shows, any number of categories where there are data.

Stepping back one should probably see this acquisition supporting Google’s effort to develop “contextual discovery” or “search with searching.” My sense is that Google is gathering multiple data inputs as part of a distinct algorithm that it will increasingly use to recommend and alert primarily mobile users to venues, events and happenings of all kinds. Personal and social data are a core component of this experience.

While Bing and Blekko incorporate Facebook Likes from my network into search to make it more personal and social, Google is trying to do something equally social but with a different expression or user experience. I’m speculating, of course, about Google’s specific objectives. Regardless the fflick acquisition should definitely be seen in the larger context of Google’s move to incorporate a “social layer” into most of its products.

Postscript, January 26: A post on the YouTube blog confirms the acquisition:

We were impressed by the technical talent, design instincts and entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team. As part of YouTube, the Fflick team will help us build features to connect you with the great videos talked about all over the web, and surface the best of those conversations for you to participate in.

Related posts:

Google’s Mayer On “Contextual Discovery” Search

Blekko, Bing & How Facebook Likes Are Changing Search

Google’s Marrisa Mayer Talks New Role, LBS And Groupon

Google Hotpot: Local Recommendations From Your Friends

Report: Google To Leverage Other Social Networks To Make Itself More Social

Google’s New Social Project Is … A Toolbar? Yawn.

Google Me: Is It Really Named Emerald Sea Or Google +1?