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

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.

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!

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.

Local Results

Until today, everyone searching at Bing within the United States generally saw the same results. Now, the city you’re searching from can make a difference.

For example, the search on the left below is where Bing detected my location as being near Los Angeles. On the right, I changed my settings to simulate being in New York:

You can see that for the Los Angeles-area results, the Los Angeles Zoo is listed higher than in the New York listings (you can click to enlarge the image). Similarly, in the New York listings, the Bronx Zoo comes higher than in the LA listings.

Outside the US, Bing has long been showing different results considered more relevant to the country of the searcher. However, everyone within those countries will still see the same results, regardless of what city they are searching from, Bing told me.

Google has been localizing results in this way Bing is now doing since at least April 2009, and the insertion of local results became even more dramatic in October 2010. Our past articles below have more about this:

• Google Confirms & Talks About Expanded Local Results
• New Place Search Shows Google’s Commitment To Local

Personalized Results

Bing is also now using past searches to reshape results for about 30% of queries that are “navigational” in nature, where a searcher is trying to find a specific web site.

For example, if you often went to Bing, searched for SMX and selected Search Engine Land’s SMX conference site from the listings as opposed to the SMX Convention Center in the Philippines, Bing would learn that you probably want the SMX conference site to be shown first — and it would start boosting it in the results.

I can’t show you an example of this in action, because the system has only just gone live, and I don’t have enough of a search history to easily trigger it. But you’ll know when it happens if you see a notification at the bottom of your search results:

The “Learn more” link leads to more information about how Bing’s search history feature works, which you’ll find here. Even if you’re not logged in, search history will work off your computer’s cookie and potentially change your search results, unless you’ve disabled the feature. You can also learn more about Bing’s search history feature in our past articles below:

• Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine
• Bing Tweaks Search History, Dings Google
• Bing Adds Search History To Auto-Suggest

Notifications don’t show when results are localized, only personalized, Bing’s director Stefan Weitz told me, when we talked about the changes yesterday,

Google’s Personalization

Google also makes personalized results based on past searches and has been doing so extensively since 2007. But unlike Bing, this might happen with any class of searches. Bing may also expand when it does personalization, but Bing told me that right now, the service wants to try it in situations where it thinks it makes the most sense, as with navigational queries.

As with Bing, Google also notifies searches at the bottom of its results when listings have been personalized — or customized, as it calls this:

Unlike with Bing, if you click on the “View customizations” link, you can see how the “regular” results would appear if they hadn’t been personalized, via a new page that appears:

Of course, the idea of “regular” results is — as I said in my opening paragraph — continuing to die. With Google doing extensive reranking based on location — not to mention on prior searches, fewer are really seeing the “normal” results that overriding customization can produce.

Personalized is the “new normal” as I wrote in one of the articles below. See them for more information about how personalization works at Google and hints at how it will likely expand at Bing.

• Google Now Notifies Of “Search Customization” & Gives Searchers Control
• Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Queries from your search history will appear in purple, while other queries will show in blue. The auto-suggest box offers options like “Manage History” and “History Off” for searchers who don’t this feature enabled.

You have to be signed in to your Google account and have Web History enabled for this to work.

Mike Blumenthal raises the good point that having actual personalization in Google Maps would be a bigger improvement.

Harry and friends ran a four-day test using a series of related search queries: “antique lamps,” “buy antique lamps,” and “buy lamps online.” The test looked at each searcher’s location, browser, most common Google app used, and use of search history features. I’d summarize some of the interesting findings as follows:

• For the most part, personalization didn’t dramatically affect the search results. “There is no massive upheaval where SERPs are vastly different from one user to another,” Harry writes.
• The top three results were “rock solid” on the initial query, but there was “small movement” on follow-up searches that “became more prominent with each related query performed.”
• The top 10 results remained consistent overall, but the more queries searched, the more “instability would creep in.”

Again, Harry goes out of his way to avoid calling these conclusions, and downplays the findings as anything close to final. He admits the data sample isn’t large enough to really dig into, and says the group also plans more tests using different types of search queries. Disclaimers accepted and understood, but this remains an interesting read for SEOs, at least for thinking about the impact of personalization if nothing else.

For more on recent developments in personalized search, see these articles for our archives:

• Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Bing has added its existing search history controls — “Clear all,” “See all,” and “Turn off” — to the Bing.com home page now. Those options appear when you click the new “History” link.

Those same controls are still available in the left-hand column of a search results page, as they’ve been since Bing launched in late May/early June.

The other piece of news is that Bing is now storing your search history for four weeks. Since its launch, Bing has only kept search history for 48 hours (as Danny Sullivan explained in Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine). Bing also explains that removing a query from your search history doesn’t remove it from Bing’s search logs, which are stored separately from any personal account information it may have about you.

But news or not, Bing’s announcement seems to contain some not-so-veiled swipes at Google’s recent announcements and trouble with privacy watchers. Sree Kamireddy — a Bing Program Manager who’s also described as its “Privacy Champ” in today’s post — says Bing’s search history team has “tried to build privacy and respect for your search history into the overall experience and not as an afterthought.” Touché! Sree later writes that “Too many systems provide us with choice, but little control,” which could be a reference to Google’s recent announcement of personalized results for all users, which could be said to take away the user’s control by opting everyone in automatically to personalized results before providing a choice to turn it off.

How Search Personalization Works

For those unfamiliar with how personalized search works, see my Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History. It goes into great detail about how Google personalizes results.

The short story is this. By watching what you click on in search results, Google can learn that you favor particular sites. For example, if you often search and click on links from Amazon that appear in Google’s results, over time, Google learns that you really like Amazon. In reaction, it gives Amazon a ranking boost. That means you start seeing more Amazon listings, perhaps for searches where Amazon wasn’t showing up before.

The results are custom tailored for each individual. For example, let’s say someone else prefers Barnes & Nobles. Over time, Google learns that person likes Barnes & Noble. They begin to see even more Barnes & Nobles listings, rather than Amazon ones.

Of course, people will be clicking on a variety of sites, in search results. So it’s not a case of having one favorite that that simply shows up for everything. Indeed, Google’s other ranking factors are also still considered. So that person who likes Amazon? If they’re looking for a plumber, Amazon probably isn’t close to being relevant, so the personalization boost doesn’t help. But in cases where Amazon might have been on the edge? Personalization may help tip into the first page of results. And personalization may tip a wide variety of sites into the top results, for a wide variety of queries.

Privacy Issues

To personalize results, Google has to record what you’re doing — and that rings privacy alarm bells. Can people see what you’ve looked for? How long is the material kept? Can you just turn it off?

You can turn it off. A history is kept for 180 days. You can delete that history at any time, but even if you don’t, it can’t actually be viewed.

In particular, we now have two “flavors” of personalized search, or “Web History” as is the official Google name for it. There’s Signed-Out Web History and Signed-In Web History.

In Signed-Out Web History, Google knows that it has seen someone using a particular browser before. Behind the scenes, it has tracked all the searches that have been done by that browser. It also logs all the things people have clicked on from Google’s search results, when using that browser. There’s no way to see this information, but it is used to customize the results that are shown. It only remembers things for 180 days. Information older than that is forgotten. Google doesn’t know your name. If you use a different browser, Google doesn’t know your past history. In fact, you can’t even see your past history.

In Signed-In Web History, Google knows that a particular Google user is using Google. Behind the scenes, it has kept a record of all the things that person has done when signed-in, regardless of what computer or browser they’ve used. If they’re using the Google Toolbar with the page tracking feature enabled, then it has also kept a record of all the pages they’ve viewed over time. This information can be viewed by the user at any time, and the user can selectively delete info. They can also delete everything, if they want. If they don’t, then Google forgets nothing.

Let’s do a chart:

Can’t View History

An important aspect to the change is understanding that there’s no way for you — or anyone — to see what you’ve searched on or clicked on in the past, if you’re using the signed-out version of web history.

Google Now Notifies Of “Search Customization” & Gives Searchers Control goes into much more depth about how last year, Google began notifying searchers if it changed their results based on their previous query. Clicking on the notification would show the previous query, which might be embarrassing or worse if you left your computer and someone else saw it. To limit exposure, only the last 30 minutes of previous query information was shown.

With the change, Google’s storing much more than the last 30 minutes of previous history. However, that’s not being shown.

Let’s do some pictures. Here, I’ve done a search for spain:

Notice the arrow pointing to Web History. This is effectively a default notification that results are being logged for personalization. Clicking on it leads to a notification page that in turn allows for opting-out.

Now here’s another search I did right after that, for travel:

Notice I’m pointing at the “View customizations” link that has now appeared. This is another notification, an explicit one where Google’s saying effectively “Hey! You searched for ‘travel,’ but I’ve altered the results I’ve shown you based on things I know about you personally.”

So what’s Google know? In this case, if you click on the link, you get shown:

I’ve highlighted the key part. Google’s saying that it used your search history to alter this. Almost certainly, this means it saw I had just search for “spain,” and so added that word to the query “travel.” In the past, it would have told me this specifically. But now that data is being kept longer, it’s not showing any previous query or past search history material.

This Freaks Me Out!

Don’t like the idea of your searches being recorded, even if you’re not logged in? Keep in mind a few things for perspective:

• All the major search engines have long recorded what you search on. Google’s simply using it to refine your results, in addition to what the others do, show ads
• Your browser itself records what you search on — and often, people fail to clear their browser histories.
• You don’t have to use it.

Remember I mentioned that opt-out page? Let’s see what it says:

See the link I’ve pointed at? Click on that, and you’ve turned off logging for personalization purposes. Google will no longer keep track of what you’ve searched on in the past, in association with your browser, in order to perform personalization. In addition, Google remembers that you don’t want to be logged in the future. For the technically inclined, this is nice. It means you can have a Google cookie that knows you don’t want to be logged, rather than having to access Google without a cookie at all.

Note that even if you opt-out, Google will still be logging what you search on as it always has done. It just won’t personalize using that information. And after 180 days, even this logged-but-not-used information is deleted automatically (see Anonymizing Google’s Server Log Data — How’s It Going? for more about this).

Change your mind? Click on that Web History link I mentioned earlier. It will oddly still show, even if you’ve opted out and nothing is being logged (plus, “Web History” is a bad name, since for signed-out users, it’s not really tracking what you do on the web). Click Web History, and you can enable custom search.

What About Diversity?

Interestingly, I’ve spoken on the subject of Google’s preexisting search personalization feature three times over the past week, and each time, a key question has arisen. If Google rewards the sites you like, does that mean eventually you’ll only see stuff you like? Would a conservative see only conservative web sites? A liberal see only liberal web sites?

No, Google says. Annoyingly, the company will not give any metrics about what percentage of results a typically searcher gets back that are personalized in some way nor the percentage of the results themselves that are changed. IE, are 85% of queries personalized? And if you get a page of personalized results, are 20% of the links on that page personalized? I couldn’t get any such figures.

However, Google did say it want to keep some results similar between users:

“We want diversity of results,” said product manager Johanna Wright. “This is something we talk about a lot internally and believe in. We want there to be variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. We want them in personalized search to be skewed to the user, but we don’t want that to mean the rest of the web is unavailable to them.”

Again, I’ve written about personalized history and notifications in the past, as well as how all this is part of what I call Search 4.0, an area that Google’s way ahead it. This takes them further down the Search 4.0 path. Be sure to read those background pieces below. It will be interesting to see how this integrates into the new privacy dashboard, also described more below:

• Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
• Google Now Notifies Of “Search Customization” & Gives Searchers Control
• Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search
• Google Dashboard Offers New Privacy Controls

Also see Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention, a follow-up piece looking more at the potential impact on search marketing and society in general on this quiet rollout.