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.

By faster, Yahoo has integrated Inquisitor with BOSS, enabling a faster return on your Yahoo queries. Yahoo has cleaned up both the Inquisitor home page and the client to be simpler and more streamlined. Finally, Yahoo has expanded the language support to Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Here is a screen shot of the new client in action:

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.

I spoke with Ariel Seidman, the director of product management for this product, and he answered a number of questions I had about the acquisition.

David Watanabe is the developer behind Inquisitor, and he is also the developer behind a few other popular Mac products, including Acquisition P2P, NewsFire RSS, and Xtorrent P2P. I asked Ariel if Yahoo is just buying Inquisitor or all the assets of Watanabe. Ariel told me Yahoo is only buying Inquisitor.

David Watanabe will work for Yahoo as an independent consultant for an unspecified amount of time. The reason is to enable Yahoo’s developers to learn the product and help with future upgrades. Watanabe should have more information about his role at Yahoo and what this means for current customers at his blog.

I asked Ariel Seidman why they have decided to acquire the product. He said the answer is basically threefold. First, the way inquisitor handles inline results, especially for navigational queries is very clever. Second, the search plugin allows people to easily integrate 3rd party search engines. Finally, it will expand awareness of Yahoo Search with the Safari browser market.

Seidman explained that Yahoo will be changing Inquisitor to default to Yahoo Search as the primary engine of choice. Yes, you will be able to change the default setting at any time. So if you prefer Live or Google, you can change it to those engines or add your own.

Ariel Seidman said he personally has been using the product since August 2007. He championed the idea of acquiring it at Yahoo and Vish Makhijani, the general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search, backed him. Vish is also a huge fan and user of Inquisitor and supported the idea of acquiring the tool.

Inquisitor is currently monetized through voluntary donations and embedded Amazon affiliate links. Yahoo will remove the affiliate links and stop accepting donations immediately.

Inquisitor will remain a standalone product and continue to be a separate brand from Yahoo. The inquisitorx.com domain will continue to be the location where you download the plugin and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

I asked Ariel if Yahoo would somehow incorporate any of the technology from Inquisitor into Yahoo Search. Ariel said, “it is fair to say that Inquisitor DNA” can show up in Yahoo products in the future. He did not give any specific examples of how or when, but said it was possible.

Finally, Yahoo would not disclose the acquisition price, nor did Yahoo expand on any future applications of Inquisitor outside of what I have mentioned above.

Finally, if you are an Inquisitor fan, I wrote a detailed post on tips on how to customize Inquisitor. It may be of help to some of your Safari users.

Google was spotted testing this feature with selected users back in August and September, and then Googlified spotted it going live this week for anyone to use.

As you can see from the screen capture below, this new feature enables users to vote up a search result or completely remove a search result from the index.

Clicking the up arrow will promote the search result to the top spot for that keyword search and place an orange marker on that result to classify the result as being pushed up. Using the X icon will hide the result from being displayed.

Google explains:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

Google launched Google Experimental Search in May of this year at where features such as Like/Don’t Like are made available for testing by anyone. You’ll also find these other features there:

• Alternate views for search results
• Keyword suggestions
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Left-hand search navigation
• Right-hand contextual search navigation

There is currently a lot of discussion around this discovery at Techmeme.

Here’s how it works: If someone types in “compare car prices” on Live Search, Microsoft’s computers note that the person is probably considering buying a vehicle. The computers then check with the list of Hotmail accounts to see if they have any information on the person. If they do, and an auto maker has paid Microsoft to target this type of person, the computer will automatically send a car ad when she next looks at a Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should see more ads that are of interest to them. “We know what Web sites they have visited and what key words they used,” says Mr. Dobson. “We can deduce what their interests are.” Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76%.

The rest of the article discusses the competitive landscape.