Hands up if you want personalised search?

Feel the magic hear the roar….personalised search is coming. Ok, so those raised on Thundercats will know those aren’t the correct lyrics but you get the idea. Personalised search is on it’s way and will soon have a serious impact on our search results (apparently).  

Before we delve into this concept, lets look into the history of search.

How have the factors which manipulated natural search results evolved over time?

• Search 1.0 (1996): Pages ranked using “on-the-page” criteria. Remember keyword stuffing the keywords tag with just about anything so you can rank? Easy times!
• Search 2.0 (1998): Pages ranked using “off-the-page” criteria. Hands up who outsourced to India! Hands up who still are?…come on we know who you are.
• Search 3.0 (2007): Vertical search results blended into regular search results.

Based on the websites you bookmark or “star” Google would configure their results based on favourites of the user with a Google profile. For example when searching for the best football team in Google when signed in this result appears at the top….and might I add, so it should be.

So is this what we want from search? Is it any good? Well depends on what you consider ‘as good’.   So what are the pros and cons?

• If you star a result then it must be of quality to that user
• However, When you starred a result in the past you may not have had a specific query in mind for the future
• Historic bookmarks could now populate the rankings resulting in crowded results
• Star result pages are not always the most relevant however they automatically gain the highly sought out top listing 

But now it goes  one step further. Last year Google announced that they will personalise search results for users who are not signed into their Google account. Apparently results will be customised based on 180 days worth of search activity from an anonymous cookie.

So should we as Natural Search specialists should we be quaking in our boots?…No not at all.

Title and descriptions…still important.

Creating good content which is relevant  and engages your audience…always important.

What is interesting however, is the importance of the brand term in search. Granted, gaining positions for your own brand term should be relatively easy. The key to do well with personalised search is to actually get people actively searching  for your brand in search engines.

With this in mind we have suddenly been brought back to the age old debate on whether or not it is worth bidding on brand terms in paid search?  What is interesting, is how personalised search has been acknowledged by marketers stateside. In a lot of cases the above the line marketing encourages people to search for the brand in Google as opposed simply stating the brand domain.

So how prepared are you? 

What do you think?  Please post your point of view.