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 From The Survey

We’ll be breaking down different aspects of the complete Pew survey in the coming days. So far, here’s our other coverage:

• Pew Survey: 68% View Targeted Ads Negatively; 59% Have Noticed Targeting

More On Personalized Search

And here are some related background pieces on personalized search:

• Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search
• Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention
• Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized
• A Conversation With Eli Pariser Of “The Filter Bubble”
• Study Asks, Can You Trust Google’s Personalized Search Results?
• Survey: People Largely Negative About Google’s Personalized Search Results
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• Scroogle’s Gone? Here’s Who Still Offers Private Searching

Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank Nothhaft are quick to rebut each of those comparisons by pointing to Trapit’s underlying technology as the differentiator.

Users input keywords or entire URLs and create “traps,” which are content modules drawing upon approximately 100,000 “high quality” content sites. Thus the corpus being tapped is a tiny sliver of the web; however Trapit’s co-founders believe that the sites they’ve identified offer a much better experience than a large index of open web content.

For example, Trapit won’t use content from “aggregator” sites (e.g., Yahoo News) or content farms. The company uses a combination of machines and humans to identify high-quality sources. Trapit then uses “semantic extraction” to identify pieces relevant to your query or URL. Over time Trapit becomes more personalized, based on explicit user ratings (thumbs up or down, like Pandora) and other signals.

In earlier interviews, Trapit’s co-founders were explicitly invoking Pandora to describe the nature of the service. With me on the phone earlier today they used a number of analogies and metaphors that indicate they’re struggling a bit to convey what’s useful and what’s different about Trapit. They said they were seeking to walk a kind of tightrope between search and social discovery and get that balance right.

Trapit has been around for about a year in private beta with 10,000 users. Data provided by Trapit showed impressive engagement metrics among these early private beta users:

• 100,000 traps (content modules) created
• 31% active users
• 24 minute average stay (vs. Facebook’s 22:53 or New York Times’ 7:13)
• 17 page views per visit (vs. 21 for Facebook)

Trapit will release iOS and Android apps, including for tablets in Q1 2012. That’s when the Flipboad and Zite comparisons will really kick in. Again the co-founders assert that their technology makes Trapit more personalized and sophisticated than more basic “social news readers” or aggregators on tablets.

Yet without the benefit of having spoken to Trapit’s co-founders as I did, you wouldn’t necessarily put it in a separate category from the crop of tablet-oriented news readers to come out in the past year: Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu, Zite, AOL Editions and Yahoo Livestand.

Another way of describing what Trapit is doing is “persistent search.” But you wouldn’t use Trapit instead of a search engine. You’d use it as a news reader. Trapit may also expand into other areas beyond news, such as shopping or deals for example. There’s nothing about the underlying capabilities that are wedded to news content.

Set up of personalized “traps” — Trapit will also recommend traps — is not as intuitive as it might be. On balance, however, the user experience was promising.

One reason Siri is engaging is because it puts a voice interface on top of its sophisticated technology. That creates greater usability than in the absence of voice. And while Trapit may have the same intelligence under the hood, the exterior isn’t quite as sexy.

It seems a lot like Google’s previous query feature but supposedly, it goes well beyond just the previous query.

Bing said the “more you search, the more Bing can learn” and thus adapts the search results for YOU based on your past searches – not just your immediate previous search.

Here is a video that explains it, we hope to have more information on this new feature soon:

Note, it is rolling out slowly over the next few days in the US.

Stefan from Bing added at the session that the adaptive previous queries are cookie based, and last for 28 days. And any content available in an individual’s Search History can be used to personalize the search experience. This is currently limited to the past 28 days if the individual is not signed in to Bing, or 18 months if they are. More details on search history are available here.

Kosmix will now become part of the newly established “@WalmartLabs.”

When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control.

Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech):

When it became clear that Kosmix wasn’t viable as a general purpose search engine the company shifted its model — multiple times. The company evolved into a vertical search engine and then into a collection of structured content pages or homepages for topics.

Behind it all was a massive taxonomy (not unlike Pandora) that made connections between places, things, entities and products. Kosmix used its technology to assemble multimedia rich Wikipedia-like “topic pages”  for different queries or subjects. Below is an example for Las Vegas:

These local pages could have beaten Google Places to the punch but the company didn’t make a promised major push into local. Instead it found great success with a vertical site, RightHealth, which the founders say is “one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.”

The company also built personalized news service “MeeHive,” which was a bit ahead of its time and ultimately discontinued. Using the same technology Kosmix later created TweetBeat, “a real-time social media filter.”

Clearly the Kosmix technology is versatile and the founders creative. Walmart will use the technology (and founders) to develop social and mobile applications. Here’s what Walmart said in its release announcing the acquisition:

“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.”

Here’s Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman discussing how Kosmix will be implemented at Walmart in more detail:

Quite a few of us at Kosmix have backgrounds in ecommerce, having worked at companies such as Amazon.com and eBay. As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform ecommerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level.

Although Microsoft might have been a more “logical” buyer, in the context of this history and the wide range of capabilities that Kosmix brings to the retailing giant — but e-commerce laggard — it makes a good deal of sense.

It starts by taking Twitter and, curiously, Google Reader feeds — though not Facebook because of the “noise” in that feed — to create a personalized content base. I only used Twitter to set up my account, which made all the content about technology. However technology is not all I care about.

If the results are too narrow, as mine were, you can easily add any number of sections, including “business & investing,” “arts & culture,” “health & exercise,” among many others. You can also add customized sections (e.g., “Steve Jobs”), which are essentially persistent search queries. As you read and respond to articles Zite learns over time and makes the content more personal.

Overall, I found Zite to be more usable than Flipboard, though Flipboard is nicer to look at. Like most people I was kind of awed by Flipboard when it came out but don’t find myself using it because it’s cluttered and kind of “incoherent.” An actual magazine has a kind of flow and overall visual and editorial “coherence” that a collection of feeds, no matter how beautiful, cannot.

To a lesser degree this is my criticism of Zite as well. If it’s going to succeed it will have to become even more magazine-like and less a feed reader. I recognize that the point of Zite and Flipboard is that they make reading feeds much nicer. But if these apps are going to gain mainstream adoption they’ll have to move beyond where they are and make the user experience truly feel like a magazine.

In addition, AOL and Yahoo both have personalized iPad magazines on deck. And while tech bloggers will probably see the universe of competitors as Flipboard vs Zite vs AOL Editions vs Yahoo Livestand, it’s actually all these plus The Daily, USAToday, NY Times and all the news publications on the iPad.

Consumers ultimately won’t care about machine learning — they might not even care about “personalization” — they’ll care about how easy the app is to use and whether it looks good. Simplicity, UI and aesthetics cannot be underestimated.

Zeitgeist literally translates “time spirit.” Zite has got the technology right now it needs to develop more “spirit.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

When the site launched last year, we referred to Hunch as a “personal decision maker;” Hunch itself used the term “decision engine.” The new home page, though, presents a change of emphasis; logged-in users are immediately presented with a group of recommendations.

The previous home page was more of an activity stream that seemed geared toward funneling users into existing decision topics. The difference between decision-making and recommending is admittedly slight, but it’s a change nonetheless. Recommendations on Hunch were previously something that users typically accessed only after going through a decision-making, question-and-answer process.

On a fact sheet updated in May, Hunch said it has more than 6,000 topics and 75,000+ possible recommendation outcomes. From that collective knowledge, Hunch has been publishing some interesting reports on its blog, like this one about summer vacation preferences, and a more recent report on food preferences.

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.

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.

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.

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.