The Google Video Blog announced the launch of personalized video recommendations based on your search history. To see them, make sure you are logged into Google and visit video.google.com. In the middle of the page, you should see, “Recommended videos.”

Google uses your past search history and your past video viewing history to compile your personalized video recommendation list. You can view up to six recommended videos at any time, and there is a next button to see more.

Here are my recommended videos:

Notice a couple from Matt Cutts, one on Linux and then a few on Jewish topics.

The Google Like/Don’t Like feature, where you can move up results, hide search results, or remove search results, seems to have been expanded to a group of test searchers.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Google Operating System, and Justin Hileman, with reports of users seeing this feature in the main search results. Justin does an excellent job taking us through each feature with screen shots.

I personally have never seen an implementation of this on any of my searches. But I know Google has been testing this over the course of the year.

Enterprise search provider FAST Search & Transfer has acquired personalization platform and recommendations engine AgentArts. The technology will be folded into FAST’s various enterprise search offerings, which include a range of site search and monetization options for online publishers. The company also has a mobile search partnership with InfoSpace.

FAST has positioned itself as a complete platform to help publishers of all stripes essentially compete with Google and avoid dependence on AdSense and other third-party contextual ad networks.

Yahoo Travel has redesigned and added a range of features, including personalization and new mapping tools to the site. It’s also seeking to more deeply integrate travel properties FareChase (its fares and rates “meta search” engine) and Trip Planner (its user-generated content site) into Travel. Flickr is also well represented throughout the redesign. I’m not going to be able to capture every nuance or aspect of the upgrade and all the new features, but I’ll highlight the main ones.

The new home page displays personalized recommendations, as well as more “social features” from Trip Planner. The personalized recommendations, prominently featured as still photographs in a horizontally scrolling menu, are drawn largely from explicit user activity and search history on the site. But there’s also reliance on user location and collaborative filtering (”those who liked Paris . . .”). Another feature of the new personalization is a pull-down menu (”my recommendations”) that changes recommendations depending on the category selected. Categories include Best Deals, Romantic, Beach, Nearby, Art/Architecture, Family, Hiking & Camping and Nightlife. The content of these recommendations come via a new structured tagging feature in Trip Planner.

One of very useful new features is the integration of a collaborative “flight planner” plug-in for Yahoo Messenger (only the desktop client right now). Built on FareChase, the idea here is that you can review, consider and book flights with friends and family in real time.

Another very interesting aspect of the redesign is what Yahoo is calling “remap.” I was told the new capability came out of Yahoo Hack Day and may be rolled out beyond Travel to other Yahoo Maps. Basically “remap” is the layering of additional maps and detail on top of existing Yahoo Maps.

Here are some examples:

• Grand Canyon

• Freedom Trail in Boston
• National Mall in Washington DC

You need to scroll to the bottom of the pages for the maps. You can play with the “opacity” of the overlaid image/map using a slider. After you take a look at one or both maps you’ll get the idea of how interesting this is as a way to highlight locations, routes or features of a destination. This also points toward “social maps” (user-generated content) that represent a somewhat different approach than what Google is doing with My Maps.

One of the problems with the travel category, arguably the most mature vertical, is that there’s so much information and so many tools online that it can be overwhelming. In addition, there’s also a lack of confidence that pricing information you’re seeing on any given site represents the best deal or lowest price.

By contrast, Yahoo’s range of tools, meta-search capabilities, user recommendations and personalization features is an impressive package that starts to look and feel pretty complete.

In the past two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to talk to both Marissa Mayer and Matt Cutts about the impact of personalization at Google. While the initial storm following Google’s announcement seems to be dying down somewhat, the ripple effects can still be felt throughout the SEM industry. In future columns I’ll probably be coming back to the personalization angle on a semi-regular basis because I really believe it’s fundamentally important to the next evolution of search. But in the next little while I’ll probably move on to other topics. Before I do move on, however, I did want to take a look at some of the criticism that has come out about personalization and provide my view on why personalization is the logical next step for search.

Crying wolf about personalization

To be honest, I’m surprised at the amount of push back to search engine personalization.

One of the biggest dissenters of personal search is Michael Gray. Both on his own blog and various comments posted on other blogs, he’s been a consistent critic of Google’s move towards personalization. Here’s just a sample of Michael’s arguments against personalization.

2+2 should always be 4 no matter where you are. It shouldn’t be 3.7 because in Brazil they like things slimmer and lighter and it shouldn’t be 4.2 in Italy because they have an aversion for waifishly thin numbers. It also shouldn’t be 3 for me because I’ve demonstrated a dislike for the number 4 for based on prior search history, but really like the number 3…

I think I get Michael’s point here but I disagree with the context. Two plus two equals four is a mathematically defined truth. It’s universal and unquestionable. But search is all about disambiguating intent from a few words formulated in your mind. There’s no universality, because the intent is solely yours. And that’s the problem the search engines are currently facing. For search to move to the next one level, disambiguation of individual intent is critical.

Semantic mapping primer

Anyone who’s heard me speak in the past has probably heard me talk about the concept of semantic mapping. For those of you who haven’t, here’s a 30 second explanation: When we launch a query on a search engine, we take a concept in our mind and try to distill it into a single query. Concepts are usually complex things, made up of a number of aspects. For example, let’s say I’m looking to replace my PDA. There are probably brands of PDA’s I’m familiar with and features that are important to me. I may be looking for independent reviews, and I may be looking for one that’s compatible with one particular data network provider. These and a number of other factors make up my concept. The various aspects of this concept can probably be translated into words, creating a number of labels for my concept. These words create a semantic map, a literal translation of my concept. But the semantic map may contain dozens, or hundreds of words and I’m certainly not going to take the time to type them all into a search engine. Remember, our average interaction with the search engine is some somewhere under eight seconds. So I distill this complex concept down into a single phrase. That’s all I give the search engine to work with.

The search engine’s job is to take that single phrase and try to provide me with the results that most closely match my semantic map. And now you see the problem that presents itself to the search engine. How can it possibly know all the words that are in my semantic map?

Matching the user’s intent

One way is to make the user do the heavy lifting. This could play out in a couple of different ways. On search engines as we currently know them, it probably means an iterative searching process. We try a phrase, see how close the matches are, and if we’re not satisfied that we’re getting the best match to our intent, we can continually tweak our phrases until the results look more relevant. But this is a time-consuming process. It is, however, the process we’ve become used to and we feel like we’re in control of it.

Another way the user could help the search engine disambiguate intent is though a new interface. One interesting approach to this is the one used by Quintura. If you want to see how semantic mapping looks in action take a look at Quintura’s interface. Quintura takes your original query and provides a semantic map based on the most likely matches to the phrase.

Example of Quintura “Cloud” for the query “pda”

You can click on words in the map and the query refines itself as you do so, narrowing the focus of the map so that it hopefully gets closer and closer to the concept in your head. Again this can be a time-consuming process and puts a lot of the onus on the user, not the background technology.

Disambiguation in the background

Ultimately, search has to solve the problem in a more transparent way. While there are some users who feel comfortable with putting the time in to refine their query and help the engine with the task of disambiguating intent, the majority of us don’t want to make that big an investment. The tool has to be much simpler and quicker to use. So that brings us back to the question, how do engines disambiguating intent without us giving it any more information to work with at the point of query? This is where personalization comes in. In the current online reality, there are really only a few places that the search engine can look to help define intent without depending on further information from the user:

• They can look at your past history and learn more about you by what you have already done
• They can look at the context of the task you’re currently engaged in, hoping that it will give some clues to what you’re looking for
• And finally, if they know something about you and your social, geographic and demographic cohort, the engine can hope that there is a similarity of thinking within that cohort, at least when it comes to common interests and intent

Each of these factors is being explored as a potential avenue to help with disambiguating intent. Right now, Google is put their eggs in the past online history basket, feeling that where you have been will provide the best signal to predict where you might want to go.

How the user wins with personalization

So how will personalization help the user experience? Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any online examples where personalization was really well integrated with the user experience currently. The best example I can come up with was Amazon’s personalization engine and that is just scratching the surface of what’s possible. So I had to reach out to a real-world analogy to try to understand this better:

Imagine you had two alternatives when you went shopping. One is a vast department store which carried everything you could possibly imagine. The store is usually well organized and everything is well labeled, but it’s up to you to navigate through the store and find what you’re looking for. There’s no one to really help you, although there are a number of useful signs to keep you pointed in the right direction.

The other option small store ran by a store owner who you deal with all the time; a store owner that knows you as a friend, knows your personal likes and dislikes and always seems to find just the right thing for you. In fact, all you have to do is say what you’re looking for in a few words, and based on how well he knows you, the store owner runs in the back and never fails to bring back exactly the right product, in the right size and the right color.

The first scenario describes where search is today. The second scenario describes where search wants to go in the future. As the scope of the Internet gets larger and larger, the need for personalization to bring it within our scope becomes more and more important. Search had a tough enough job when it was just trying to connect us with websites.

Now it’s trying to connect us with websites, local businesses, news sources, images, audio files, videos, and the list will continue to grow and grow. Search has to move beyond its current paradigm of one query and a list of links to websites. The challenge of disambiguation becomes exponentially harder as there are more potential matches with content. You have to narrow the odds on one side of the equation or the other. Search has no intention of restricting the focus of the content is indexing, so the only choice is to get better at determining intent with the user. That’s why personalization in some form is inevitable.

The user’s sticking points with personalization

Another source of criticism is how personalization may impact the credibility of search results. Once again a comment from Michael Gray:

Let’s take personalized SERP’s a bit farther, let’s imagine we have something like digital books that can rewrite themselves based on user preferences. Instead of Hermione Granger being a brown haired slightly bookish student at Hogwarts, she’s a buxom blonde in a mini-skirt because I’ve demonstrated a preference for that in the past. For someone else she’s a raven haired Gothic princess, for another she’s more of a debutante prom queen.

Here, I’m not sure the point that Michael is trying to get across. We have a totally different level of engagement with the book we’re reading than we do with the search engine. Our interaction with the book can be several hours in duration. Our interaction with any given search experience is probably a few seconds at most. The last thing we wanted to do is get to know the “character” of the search engine results page. Books depend on characters to carry the plot of the story. There is no plot to a search engine results page. It’s simply a presentation of options to match our intent. The overall integrity of the search engine results pages determined solely by its degree of relevancy to the user. Anything that improves that degree of relevancy makes the search results that more useful to the user. There’s no artistic integrity to maintain.

But Michael is not the only critic. Others worry about the potential impact of unknown algorithmic factors on the results that they could be seen on their search results page. This was a comment on my blog from Adam.

The biggest risk I see in personalized search is latency. When you return from your vacation, how long will it take before Google stops biasing results towards travel/Hawaii or perhaps thats a non-issue. I equate this to the impact of buying a gift of a childrens book on Amazon—all your recommendations going forward are tainted with that purchase.

Another concern is the pain with signing in and signing out and how Google knows who is who?

Okay, so I should log into my account, then when my wife wants to surf, she should log into her account. Then, my kids should do the same. Of course, I can just buy every one a computer. The truth is, until this process of identifying users becomes nearly automatic, I don’t see the Google method as adding a great deal of value. Steve Haar, Editor – Think About Search

Am I signed in or not?

With these two concerns, I think we are getting to the heart of where the potential problems from a user’s point of view may lie. What if our past online paths aren’t a good predictor of where we might go in the future? At this point Google is telling us that we always have the opportunity to toggle personalization off and on. The one issue I have is that a number of users don’t even know they’re logged on, despite Google’s claims that it’s easy to see. We just did an in-service session with a large client of ours where a couple members of our team met with a number of their client-side counterparts. While there, they talked a little bit about the possible impact of personalization on the client’s search visibility. The client frankly didn’t see that it was going to be that much of an impact because, in their words, “no one really signs into Google anyway, do they?” Our team pointed out to them that they were, in fact, signed in and that their personal search history was being compiled with each search they did. They were shocked to learn this.

In my conversation with Marissa Mayer she felt strongly that the indications on whether or not you were signed in were very clear to the user. I do disagree here. I know for a fact that once users become engaged with the task of searching, a look up in the upper right-hand corner to see if or not their e-mail address is showing is just not something that happens very often. Every heat map we’ve ever produced of the search results page shows virtually zero scanning up in this area.

So the fact is, for the majority of users who are signed in, they’ll forget that they are signed in. I’m acutely aware of personalization and I often have to double check to see whether or not I’m logged in when the results look little strange to me.

And if personalization does significantly improve the search experience, do we start developing split personalities where our at- home personas differ significantly from our at-work personas? Do we have to start keeping multiple profiles for Google? On multi-user computers, how does Google keep everyone straight? The last thing Google wants is to make signing in and signing a pain. They would much prefer that everyone gets signed in and then forgets about it.

How fast do we go down the personalization path?

Ironically, despite all the negative feedback, the biggest problem that Google is probably facing with personalization is not that it’s going too far, too fast, but rather that it’s not going far enough. Google is addressing the above user concerns by treading very carefully down the path of personalization. Right now, only one in five searches will be impacted by personalization and it will only lift two results into the top 10. In this way, it’s really not a major impact for most of us on the majority of our searches. Google’s cautious approach is definitely showing here. But for personalization to deliver the win that Google is banking on, it’s going to have to play a much bigger role on the search results page. Right now, personalization is only “turned on” by Google when there’s existing search history. So it’s the searches where you tend to be in familiar territory where personalization will have its greatest impact.

This has a somewhat humorous side effect for the SEOs of the world, because we all tend to do those impromptu searches where we see either how we or our clients rank for certain phrases. Of course, we also tend to click through whenever we see our site or our client site show up in the results. This creates a pattern in our search history which will naturally boost the position of those listings we clicked on. This results in the heady but temporary thrill of thinking that our clients have jumped dramatically in the rankings and are now showing in the top 10. Then we realize that we’re logged into personalized search and it’s our past search history that’s given these sites the boost, not the Google algorithm.

But doesn’t it make sense that personalization is most needed when we’re not in familiar territory? Isn’t the challenge of disambiguating intent tougher when the concepts in our heads are fuzzier and not as well defined? To me that’s where personalization could deliver the big win. When it can help me explore territory that I’m unfamiliar with more confidently and helps connect me to the sites I’m looking for, personalization becomes a huge user win. Personalization as its being currently implemented from Google will help most of us in the short term primarily with our navigational searches. These are the searches where we can use Google as a shortcut to get to sites quickly. In the past we may have had to scroll through a few pages of results to find the sites we’re looking for, but now personalization will help lift those sites closer to the top.

Finally, probably my favorite dissenting posted comment was one where I was accused of the complete ignorance of Chaos Theory. Guilty as charged.

One wonders where in the world people like Mr.Hotchkiss are coming from. Chaos theory which Mr. Hotchkiss apparently sees as something unique to “dissenters” really is rather beside the point.

(Funny, I don’t remember even mentioning Chaos Theory in any of my writings about search personalization)

It merely discloses that if Mr. Hotchkiss had a scintilla of knowledge about chaos theory as applied to information per se, he would understand that there is an inverse correlation between the uniformity and complexity of any system, including information systems, and the ability of such systems to produce reliable results.

Hmmm, I’m not sure what he’s saying but I don’t think he’s agreeing with me.

There’s a lot of unrealized potential still to be found in personalization and Google freely admits this. They realize that these are the first few steps on a long path towards a better user experience. And with any implementation of change, there is always a degree of nervousness around that change. Although the current paradigm of iterative searching where we use a query and refine it in order to get closer to the content we are looking for can be cumbersome and time-consuming in some cases, it does leave us in control. And it’s this lack of control that appears to be the biggest push back point against personalization. Many of us are just not at a point where we can trust technology to be able to interpret us as individuals. Be that as it may, I’m not sure we’ll have a choice.

Gord Hotchkiss is CEO of Enquiro, a search marketing firm that produces search engine user eye tracking studies and other research. The Just Behave column appears Fridays at Search Engine Land.

This subject is worthy of perhaps a 10,000 word New Yorker article. But this will just be a relatively short post based on some thinking following a meeting with Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim in San Francisco the other day.

Google has been dubbed the “start page for the Internet.” Cynics would protest that it’s become a kind of toll-booth. But that exalted position most recently enabled Google to turn in a stunning $3.2 billion quarter.

The Internet (and search in particular) is more dynamic and arguably more competitive than any other industry. Even so, it is very difficult to predict (or perhaps even imagine) an online future that looks very different than what exists today or one that doesn’t rely heavily on search. Of course, we can make certain bland statements like “wireless may be disruptive” or “the Internet on TV will look very different” or “Metaverses could change everything.”

But a “post-search” future may indeed be coming. I don’t mean to imply that search will ever be obsolete; it won’t. What I mean to suggest is that reliance on search and time spent with search may diminish as RSS feeds and other structured content delivery mechanisms are adopted by users.

Sites like MySpace, which could be seen as a kind of successor to AOL, have pointed to an Internet that isn’t as Google-centric, which is one reason Google did the MySpace search/paid search deal.

But back to Netvibes.

Netvibes is quickly described as a personal homepage, Internet dashboard or even a new kind of portal. You may not have heard of the site but in about 15 months it already has more than nine million users in the U.S. and Europe. Former journalist turned Internet entrepreneur Tariq Krim, who runs Netvibes from Paris (must be nice), said that in creating Netvibes he was simply trying to solve his own problem: managing the Internet’s information overload.

It has built this traction with early adopters based almost exclusively on mentions in high profile blogs. But now the mainstream media is starting to cover the site. The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg (subscription required) recently wrote about Netvibes (and competitor Pageflakes) in the context of online personalization.

Everything old is new again and these sites, in a sense, are nothing new. My Yahoo, for example, has been around since the mid-90s. There is also Google’s Personalized Homepage, Live.com, MyMSN, MyTimes (NY Times) and Yahoo Desktop widgets, among others. On that last point, Netvibes is definitely part of an emerging “widget ecosystem.”

Regardless of whatever category or label you want to affix, the idea here is that I have all the content and tools of interest in front of me, including e-mail, IM and search. (Netvibes supports Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Snap). MyYahoo, which is badly in need of an upgrade – one is reportedly coming soon – may have already missed its opportunity to dominate the space.

As mentioned, Netvibes’ adoption so far has been by “power users” and arguably the site is too complex for “the masses.” Krim understands this and stressed simplification — and more viral elements — in future editions of Netvibes.

One of the arguments in favor of vertical search vs. general search is that it offers better and deeper data and richer experiences. There’s also the parallel complaint that search fails to offer enough structure to satisfy basic user needs in many cases.

In one way of looking at it, Netvibes brings the structured content of vertical search together with the breadth of general search in a “push” metaphor. I don’t mean to be pushing Netvibes (so to speak), it’s just what got me thinking.

If Netvibes, or MyYahoo or another competitor, can fulfill the promise — and this is absolutely critical — of an easy-to-use Internet dashboard with all my content (i.e., news, blogs, photos, email, IM, community, shopping, etc.) in a single place we may see broad user adoption of these sites. And I predict we will.

A great many searches today are navigational: using search simply to get to a known/desired site. Netvibes and its competitors’ more structured approach to delivery of this same content (and viral delivery of “serendipitous” content) would potentially come, to a degree as yet unknown, at the expense of search.

If more content is “pushed” to me including, for example, alerts (e.g., classifieds, travel deals), I have fewer reasons to “go out” looking for it. And that means fewer reasons to go to Google.

Google is stepping up the push into personalized search results. A new change announced today should cause many more people to take up the service. In turn, the growth of personalized search should have a dramatic impact on search marketers as the days of "same results, all around" eventually come to an end. For searchers, the change means needing to be more careful about when you sign-up to use a Google service, if you’re concerned about having your search history recorded. More about both issues, in the story below.

Starting today, anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products:

• Search History
• Personalized Search
• Personalized Homepage

You can override the decision to have Search History enabled, but honestly, you’ll need sharp eyes. I completely missed that this was added as a default choice to the new account sign-up page. In fact, I missed it twice, as I tested the system by making two different accounts.

Look under the "Re-enter password" box on the Google Accounts sign-up page:

You’ll see another box that says:

Creating a Google Account will enable Search History. Search History is a feature that will provide you with a more personalized experience on Google that includes more relevant search results and recommendations. Learn More

I suspect many people will blow right past this box and never even see this is enabled. I’d prefer if Google called more attention to the section, perhaps with highlighting, if it’s going to be checked by default.

The attention is needed because the Search History feature stores sensitive, private information. I’ll cover this more below. But Google does at least provide some additional warnings that it is on. When someone first searches with it enabled, they get a highlighted message like this:

And clicking on that message (or the Search History link at the top of the page for the first time) brings up a special explanation page, which covers topics such as pausing search history:

By the way, for those with existing Google Accounts, Search History still has to be manually enabled by visiting this page. As for personalized search, that’s now enabled for all accounts new or not, regardless of whether you have Search History running, as I’ll explain more further below. And all accounts, new or not, automatically have personalized home pages.

Search History

Let’s look more closely at Search History, which as I said is the most sensitive of the three products new accounts get. Search History is a feature introduced back in April 2005 that keeps track of every search you’ve made and page you’ve clicked on from Google search results. Here’s an example of my Search History screen, giving me access to the recorded information:

You can see how the system is keeping track of web searches I do, as well as image, news and Froogle shopping searches, sponsored links I click on and more (music is for when you get special music results like this which leads to this).

In the wake of last year’s search history leak from AOL, more and more people are becoming sensitive to what Google in particular and search engines in general record. They may not want search information stored. But now, Google’s doing it automatically if they enroll in any Google service, unless they specifically opt-out.

There are some good reasons why this is happening, as Google will explain further below. But that won’t negate some of the concerns. The good news is that it is easy to opt-out of the Search History service, if you don’t want to use it. Here’s how.

If you’re signed into a Google service and do a search, at the top of the search results page above the results count line, you’ll see some links like this:

One of these links will be "Search History." Select that. Next, you’ll get to your own Search History page similar to what I showed above. Look over at the right hand side. You’ll see a Search History section with a bunch of boxes, like this:

See the "Pause" link near the bottom? Click that. Now a big yellow box like this should show in the middle of your Search History page:

The box says::

Your search history has been paused.
This service will not collect any history until you choose to resume. Resume. Learn more.

Do this, and Search History will be disabled until you choose to switch it back on. It will stay that way even if you log out and then back in.

You have other options. See that "Settings" link below Pause? Click that, and you can individually choose which services to pause recording with. OK with a web search history but not with images? You can do that.

Below the Settings link is a "Remove Items" link. Chose that, and you’ll see these options at the top of the page:

Those allow you to clear out all items listed on a page or your entire search history, if you want. Alternatively, you can tick items individually to wipe them out. The help pages have more information.

Be aware that while deleting wipes out material from your search history (and keeps it from being used in personalized search), Google says the records are still kept in some form. That’s something I’d like to see changed. Delete should wipe the material out entirely. I asked Google about this, why delete doesn’t completely delete, and got this answer:

As is standard in the industry, we use aggregate user data to analyze usage patterns and diagnose problems with our system, as well as to improve our services to users. This aggregate information is not associated with a user’s Google Account. As reflected in our privacy policy, we maintain this data for as long as it is useful for those purposes.

[Postscript: Google later told me that the some form referenced above meant server logs, which are now being anonymized. See Google Anonymizing Search Records To Protect Privacy for more on that.]

If Search History completely freaks you out, there’s the nuclear option. This help page talks about the Delete Search History option. Choose this, and you can remove the Search History feature entirely from your account. Note that this will also wipe out some of the usefulness of Google Personalized Search, which I’ll come to next.

Finally, a reminder. You can export your search history and take it with you, if you like. There’s a feed option that should allow this, though I haven’t tested it myself. More information about it is here from the help pages.

Google Personalized Search Results

Your search history records are big part of powering the second service I mentioned from Google, Google Personalized Search. I like the service a lot. The current version rolled out in June 2005, and I’ve found it often improves my results in subtle ways.

From talking with Google — and from my own experiences — personalized search reshapes your results primarily by noting the types of sites you select from the search results. That allows Google to look at those sites and then give them a boost in the rankings, especially if you visit them often. In addition, Google can determine sites and pages that seem related to those you are already visiting, in order to give them a boost.

Beyond your search history, Google also looks at the content on your Google Personalized Homepage – what gadgets you have there, feeds you are reading and so on — in order to shape your personalized search results. This is a new signal they’ve just started to use. Another new signal is Google Bookmarks. Pages you save in these also influence the results. In case you’re wondering, your email in Gmail does NOT have an impact, as Google explains here.

To get personalized search in the past, you generally had to sign-up for the service specifically. Now everyone gets it. You even get it if you disable Search History. "We’ll just have less to work with in terms of making your results better," said Sep Kamvar, engineering lead for personalization at Google.

That "less" are the other signals I mentioned: content on your personalized homepage and any Google Bookmarks that you’ve saved. The advantage to this is that these still offer a way to get more tailored results if you’re uncomfortable storing your search history.

Many people won’t mind building up a search history. That’s good, because it makes personalized search much better. Here’s an example:

Above I’ve shown regular results on the left, personalized ones on the right. These are both from a search on search engine marketing. The arrows show how two sites I often go to, ClickZ and SEMPO, move up in the rankings. You can also see how another site I’m often at, Search Engine Guide, jumps into the top results (it was on the second page or regular results).

My search history makes all this happen. As I said, it’s subtle, not massive. Many queries aren’t changed at all, Google said. For those that are, there are generally slight shifts in the rankings.

"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 Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google.

I always joke that personalized search is also a good ego search reinforcer. People tend to go to their own sites often. That helps make your own site rank better in the results. This would happen to me with Google Personalized Search, and I’d get excited. Then I’d see the "Personalized Search" message and wonder if I’d still be there in regular results when I switched the results off.

This brings me to the search marketing aspect. It used to be only some searchers got personalized results at Google. Now everyone who is signed in to a Google service is going to get them, as I explained above.

This means the days of everyone seeing the same results for any particular query are growing more numbered. What’s number one for one person might be number three for another and not even show up in the top ten for yet another. The SEO "fronts" as I’ve called them in the past will grow:

In Eurekster’s system, only those within your search network can directly influence you. This effectively creates hundreds, thousands and even millions of different possible results for the same search.

Click spammers suddenly face many different "fronts" in the war to be in the top ten, and they only get to fight in that war by invitation — if someone they know asks them to be part of their network. Eurekster assumes "friends don’t spam friends," and it’s a pretty safe assumption….

Will marketers find a way to spam personalized search? That remains to be seen. History so far has shown that each improvement eventually gets less effective. Heck, the Google My Search History Spam from May shows how you can spam entries easily into someone’s search history at Google. It’s still working. But while you can leave entries, you aren’t generating clicks — and so you aren’t impacting the personalized search results. I’m sure personalization will lose some spam resistance over time, but there’s no doubt it will make spamming results much harder.

I beat the drum about this coming years ago. Gord Hotchkiss recently started a new conversation about it in his The Future of SEO in a Personalized Search Interface and The SEO Debate Continues posts. Nice and timely, because this change from Google makes those multiple fronts much more a reality.

Don’t Fear The Personal Results!

The change is good news for searchers. It’s also good news for site owners with good content, who should get rewarded by visits. That’s especially so if you try these tips:

• Titles & Descriptions are crucial: You need the clickthrough more than ever. Clickthroughs get your site as seen as possibly important to a particular person’s profile.
   
• Get on the Google personalized homepages of searchers. That means offering them a feed or a gadget and encouraging take-up with an Add To Google buttons.
   
• Put Google Bookmark buttons on your site, such as the one offered by AddThis. Getting bookmarked also helps you be seen as important.

By the way, you used to know if personalized results were happening if you saw this message:

That "Turn OFF" link above the message let you switch off the results and see regular ones. Now the link is gone, with only the "Personalized Results" message remaining next to the match count number. If you see it, Google has personalized your results. If you want to see regular results instead, you have to log-out of the system.

I miss the Turn OFF link. I liked being able to toggle and see if Google was making things better or worse with personalized search (I like it, but occasionally it does push down sites I think should do better). Heck, I even wanted to see personalized results flagged in some way, so you could easily spot what was changed. How about it?

"We could badge those results. We’ve been hesitant to do that because of confidence and quality concerns and also because they can be distracting. But that’s an ongoing dialog," Mayer said.

Kamvar also noted that I’m pretty unusual in wanting to go back-and-forth, which is true enough: "Most people want the best results, and it doesn’t matter the signals we use to get the best results."

Google Personalized Homepage

The Google Personalized Homepage is the easiest of the three features to understand. Everyone gets this when they open a Google Account now, something that’s unchanged from before. To use yours, just look for the Personalized Home link at the top right-hand side of the home page, after you sign in:

By the way, Mayer said that the personalized home page feature was the fastest growing Google product in 2006. She couldn’t release the actual percentage those using the service. She did say it’s less than the majority of users but still a substantial number.

Why The Change?

Now that I’ve covered the features, I wanted to spin back with the reasons behind the move. We already got a hint of this in Google’s earnings call this week. Personalization was touched on many times, probably most extensively by Google cofounder Larry Page, who talked about trying to increase it:

We’re very excited about personalization. Actually, in my comments, I mentioned personalized homepages and so on and use of gadgets there, which we have been really excited about our growth in those areas and the usage of those products and how excited users are about them.

I think we have a ways to go in really promoting those features. We’re starting to really get very healthy usage. But it’s not that obvious to me when I go to Google how to get to those things, and so I think we’ve got a lot more growth in store. Also the quality improvements we get with personalized search are also quite significant, and we’re very excited about that, and then that driving more search and more monetization and so on. So I think overall, I think we’re very excited about personalization. We’ve had a lot of significant traction in terms of users and we have a lot more opportunity in terms of promoting that very useful functionality to our huge base of users.

Unfortunately, one problem Google was having with personalization was helping people know what they could personalize.

"People would come from Gmail but wonder if they had a personalized homepage. They did, but only if they put stuff on it," said Mayer. "There were too many questions. The decision tree was too complicated."

Indeed, one funny story she passed along was that of Google CEO Eric Schmidt wondering if he had personalized search enabled. After it was explained to him all the steps to ensure he was signed up, "He just blinked his eyes and shook his head," Mayer said.

With the new change, Google hopes personalized take up — especially that of personalized search — will grow. That’s important, because personalized search is seen as a key way to improve search quality.

Google’s also hoping that making these services active when you are signed into any Google will also encourage growth. However, Gmail poses a special situation. Many Gmail users often log-out after reading their mail. That means with the new system rolled out today, they also get logged out of their personalized homepage, personalized search results and search history. Mayer said Google might consider making Gmail a special case where signing out there doesn’t sign you out of Google Accounts systemwide.

Ex-Yahoo Exec now Pageflakes CEO by Om Malik reports that Dan Cohen, who was the Head of My Yahoo business unit, left Yahoo to become the CEO of Pageflakes. Gary Price recently reviewed Pageflakes, describing it as an easy and free way to “build a dynamic personalized home/start page.” It is a lot like Google Personalized Homepage, Netvibes and Microsoft Live. So Dan Cohen has a lot of work ahead of him to compete with some of these brands.

Desktop and file search can be very different than web search, and the user’s context plays an important role in what is valuable when creating a search algorithm. But understanding context may be helpful to web search, too.

Microsoft’s Susan Dumais has done an extensive amount of research on how users interact with search applications for the desktop and for Microsoft’s Vista. She recently visited Yahoo, as part of their Big Thinker Series. The presentation was at their Yahoo! Mission College location on Tuesday, December 12, 2006.(via Gary Price.) A Microsoft patent application from this morning expands upon the presentation.

A video of that presentation is now available through Yahoo Video, and discusses ideas about improved search based upon user context, and covers rich metadata, tagging, memory landmarks, refinding things, and keeping found things found.

As Susan Dumais notes in the presentation, information retrieval isn’t done for its own sake. It needs to be thought about in the the context of the individuals and groups that it is created for. While we can think about queries in terms of informational, transactional, and navigation uses, people also are researching, learning, and being entertained when searching.

A lot of the presentation focuses upon research that has been documented in a few papers, and articles:

• Stuff I’ve Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use (pdf)
• Susan Dumais: Changing the Way People Search for Information, Through Algorithms and User Interfaces
• Searching for Your Information? Go PHLAT Out

We’re told that the research on refinding information has influenced the Microsoft Live interface, but that it also looks at different information silos, which require some different ways of thinking about search, such as the web, email, files, applications, photos, contacts, and calendaring.

The future of search is going to involve more than just the web. It will look at searching intranets, and a searcher’s own computer as well, and because it will involve a searcher’s own content, they believe that they can provide a richer user experience which includes things like end user tagging, while still providing a single unified point of access to finding information within the context of performing other tasks.

As part of the research that Microsoft did while looking at search in different contexts, they found some interesting information about desktop search:

• Queries tend to be very short – shorter than on the web,
• Query syntax allows for a more advance search interface
• Three most popular advanced operators:
• filtering
• resorting
• new query
• People opened email often, in an enterprise environment
• Different search characteristics were exhibited for home workers
• About half the things opened were things that people received in the last month.
• Different kinds of content had different halflives – websites – half of them were things looked at in the last couple of weeks.
• Date is by far the most common sort order – time is really important in retrieving your own information.
• Very few “best match” searches – people already know what they are looking for.
• Metadata is very useful, but the quality is variable. Some applications enforce better metadata collection than others, such as email.
• Useful data is dependent upon applications – for instance, in calendars, the most important date isn’t when you received a notification, but rather the date of the meeting.

There’s more in the presentation about personalized search, memory landmarks and timelines, and the benefits of user tagging. It also includes a very brief comparison of the different desktop search methods from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Coinicidentally, I noticed a new patent application published this morning from Microsoft, with Susan Dumais listed as one of the inventors, that covers a fair amount of the information discussed in the presentation.

Analysis of topic dynamics of web search Invented by Susan T. Dumais, Eric J. Horvitz, Xuehua Shen Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20070005646 Published January 4, 2007 Filed: June 30, 2005

Here’s a snippet from the description of the document that starts to discuss some of what it includes:

[0001] The Web provides opportunities for gathering and analyzing large data sets that reflect users’ interactions with web-based services. Analysis and synthesis of the rich data provided by these logs promises to lead to insights about user goals, the development of techniques that provide higher-quality search results based on enhanced content selection and ranking algorithms, and new forms of search personalization. The ability to model and predict users search and browsing behaviors has been explored by developers in several areas. The analysis of URL access patterns has been used to improve Web cache performance and to guide pre-fetching. In general, models developed for caching and pre-fetching average over large numbers of users, and exploit the consistency in access patterns for individual URLs or sites, but do not consider topical consistency. Another line of investigation has explored the paths that users take in browsing and searching web sites. This includes clustering techniques to group users with similar access patterns, with the goal of identifying common user needs. This technology involves detailed analysis of individual web sites. There has been some recent work exploring how page importance computations can be specialized to different users and topics.

If you want to dive into the patent filing first, I’d recommend watching the presentation before you do. Instead of trying to understand what it was attempting to get at, I found myself anticipating things that might be included within it because I viewed the presentation before tackling it.

Decipho officially launched on December 14th after having been available since October. It’s an interesting search engine because it takes the concept of social search another stage further, while at the same time offering very useful personalisation.

There are lots of things that you can do with it, but I would recommend registering and then uploading a list of your bookmarks to start you off. Unfortunately these have to be from your browser, rather than any other bookmarking services at the moment. Once you’ve done that, take a look at the search interface itself. Very straightforward, following the Google model of having little on the screen other than the search box, although Decipho is offering a couple of interesting extras – a shops/services box and research/info box with a slider bar underneath.

If you start with a straightforward search your results are pulled out and made available in 2 columns. The left hand one gives a maximum of 40 ‘regular results’ while the right is a collection of ‘my results’. The set of ‘my results’ is based on websites that feature in your uploaded listing of bookmarks (and what a useful way to find material that you’ve lost in there!), and it will also find any websites that you’ve previously ranked, and those will be added as well.

Users are able to categorise websites into the shopping/research categories previously mentioned or into personal categories that they can create for themselves. These categories also appear when a user runs a search, to another way of limiting results.

So far, so good, but there is more with this particular search engine.

Once a search has been run, users are prompted with options to expand a search with various suggested terms, although ‘expand’ really isn’t quite accurate, as a lot of the suggestions will actually narrow a search very quickly.

Searchers can also use the the slider bar to manipulate their results even more. This is the ’social meter’ which allows you to select what percentage a websites user ranking for a specific category must be equal or greater than. To be honest, I’ve read and re-read the description of how this is supposed to work, and I still don’t fully understand it, and when I tried it out it seemed to have no effect at all. Hopefully you will have better luck!

Another nice feature that I liked was the ability for website owners to claim their sites, and add their own information. This can best be seen by doing a search for decipho and clicking on the ‘owners message’ under the result.

All told, it’s an interesting approach to marrying together social and personalised search options . If you have a spare 5 minutes it’s worth trying out.