Internet Marketing Course -
Personalized Search

Personalized Search is hot again!

Within a month of each other, Amazon, in their latest release of their home brewed search engine, A9, has used personalized search to help differentiate it from its much larger competitors, and Yahoo! introduced its My Yahoo! Search beta personalized search service.

My favorite definition of Personalized Search is that it's the shifting of who determines search results relevancy from the search engine to the searcher. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea, until you begin to analyze what that really means to the searcher. In order for the searcher to determine relevancy of search results for a search he/she performs, it means that the searcher must divulge a significant amount of personal information about what's important (relevant) to him/her to whoever owns the search engine.

And then there's the whole issue of what's important to the searcher and when it's important. In order for a search engine to return relevant search results, it not only must ask and receive a significant amount of the searcher's personal information, it must also track the searches being made and use that insight to tweak that searcher's personal search algorithm. If a searcher performs a large amount of searches on car specifications in a short amount of time, does that mean that the searcher has become a car aficionado, or does it mean that the searcher needs to purchase a car in the near term? Can a search engine make that determination?

Brittany Thompson did a very nice overview article on Personalized Search in an August '04 edition of WebProNews.com (here's a link to her article). Her article, titled "Is Personalized Search the Future?", discusses the pros and, in my opinion, the many more cons of the future of personalized search.

I am obviously not a big fan of "Personalized" Search. I'm a much bigger advocate of Categorized Search. I've provided links to the latest iterations of personalized search, so you can decide for yourselves how successful this search innovation will be among Web searchers.

Latest Examples of Personalized Search include:

Amazon's New A9 Search Engine

My Yahoo! Search

My Yahoo Search features the ability to Save, Block, Share, and Find personalized search results.

MyJeeves from AskJeeves (Ask.com)

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