The Chatterbox

The Personalization of Search and what it means to You

I've written before about the Personalization of Search, but it's always been very general stuff. Today let's dig a bit deeper into the subject to explore what it means to You, the web marketer. And how it may affect the choices you make in designing your site.

Search Engine Marketers, or SEMs, tend to fall into one of two camps.

There are those who concentrate almost totally on getting the search engines to rank their site well, come hell or high water. They'll spam the search engines with links from totally irrelevant sites, stuff their keywords in every conceivable nook and cranny and basically hope that having a high ranking site alone will convince people to buy from them. There is little thought or consideration to the actual human visitor, and it shows.

The other camp is almost totally customer-focused, spending their time and energy on building a site that is easy to navigate, chock full of rich content and provides real value to visitors. The search engines are a secondary thought to these marketers, though still important. But if the choice ever comes down to doing something just for the engines that will not benefit, or could even hurt, the offering when viewed from the customer's perspective; people who fall into this camp will always choose customer satisfaction over gaining another few search engine positions.

Recent history has shown that it is sometimes very difficult for the customer-focused marketer to compete with Sammy-the-stuffer. At least for search engine rankings, though their traffic converts at a much higher rate. In some markets there are so many sites doing the spammy stuff that it's difficult to even crack the Top 20 positions for moderately competitive keyword phrases.

That's all about to change...

With the debut of Personalization of Search, or POS in Randy-speak, I expect there to be a major shift. Here are the how's and why's of my opinion.

For POS to be effective for the search engines and their customers (the searchers) there has to be some way for the individual user to provide feedback to the search engine. That's been the missing element in Search forever. There has been no fairly automated method for the individual searcher to tell the search engine "Yes, this site provides exactly what I was looking for" or "These guys are duping both of us!" The only feedback the search engines got was how many people used their service, but it never got down to the individual searcher or site level.

POS is going to have to introduce a new level of searcher feedback to be effective. Why? Take a look at this brief scenerio.

Let's say you went to a search engine and conducted a search for "Blue Lederhosen". In that search you get 10 sites on the first page to choose from that the search engine algorithm has determined are a match your request.

Reading the snippets provided you decide to click on the site in the #3 position, because it matches the idea that you have in mind. When you get there you look around a bit and make your own decision as to whether it provides what you're looking for or not. If you're happy you buy some blue lederhosen. If not you go back to the search engine to try another site. Just like with what happens now.

The difference with POS is that the search engine is going to want to provide some way to find out if the site you chose was the right one for you or not. If it was, they'll want to make sure they give that particular site a boost in your personal searches the next time you look for the same thing or something similar, like Red Lederhosen. In fact, the search engine will likely want to bump this site up from the #3 position to the #1 position for you.

By the same token, if you got to the site and it was totally mis-advertising itself, the search engine will want to know that too! So that the next time you search for the same or similar phrase this particular site will be pushed down far enough to allow another possible match to rise to your attention.

That's what the Personalization of Search is all about, at the individual user level. The search engine being able to collect enough data about You and what You want to help you find what you're looking for more easily. Even if the first search starts out being exactly what we see today, and it likely will in the beginning, they need a way to fine tune the results they show you.

Now let's extrapolate things and expand on the concept a bit.

Since the search engines are going to be receiving a lot of feedback from a lot of people, they should be able to use that information to improve their overall service for everyone after some time has passed. Let's work with small numbers to show you what I mean.

Taking the same scenerio as above, let's say that 100 people from around the world searched for "Blue Lederhosen" wanting to buy some. Let's also say that all 100 of these people went to the #3 site as above.

Now, for the sake of discussion let's say that the #3 site is using a lot of dodgy tactics to attain that lofty position. They have hidden text in their code that never reaches human eyes, they're cloaking, they've run a linking campaign that gives a false impression to the engines what the site is really about. In fact, they don't sell Lederhosen at all! Instead they have a fakey directory site that is targeting the phrase for no other reason than to get traffic and hope someone clicks on one of their ads so that they get paid a few pennies. The only thing they sell themselves are ebooks on how to scam your way to the top of the search engines.

That's definitely not what you were looking for. But I'm sure we've all run into something like that in our surfing. ;-)

So now let's say that 40 (or however many) of the people who 100 people who searched for Blue Lederhosen use whatever method is provided to send feedback to the search engine that this particular site has duped them into showing highly for the phrase.

Based upon this real human input, the search engine can now choose to remove this site from showing in the Top 100 or Top 1,000 for the phrase we found it on. Not just for us, but for everyone. The engines could also send it into oblivion for related phrases with reasonable assurance of making a correct decision. In fact, if they got enough bad reports, as a percentage of unique users, about the site on multiple phrases it appears for, they can drive it down in the rankings across the board!

It has been said by some for many years that search engine algorithms simply aren't smart enough to make some of the decisions that need to be made in order to clean up all of the crap that shows up in some markets. And those people are right. There needs to be a human element in the mix somewhere. However it would take a huge labor force to introduce human judgement in the equation, more than any single company could afford to hire without a doubt. That's why it's never been done.

With the debut of the Personalization of Search the engines will have this huge labor force at their disposal, without having to pay a dime for it. And searchers will also be happy, because as POS is used more and more the SERPs will get a lot more relevant. The spammy site tricks simply will not work anymore, because the human element will be part of the criteria of how well any site ranks.

It's a Win-Win situation for both the engines and searchers. And in my opinion it's also a Win for search engine marketers who go to the time and trouble of conducting their business in a legitimate manner.

Will it take some time to reach this Search Nirvana? Yes, there is no doubt there. POS isn't even a reality as I write this. But it's getting close. Whichever search engine comes out with a well thought out and workable version of Personalization will have a huge leg up on their competitors. I fully expect to see some form of POS within the next 12 months.

Once it arrives it is only a matter of time before those who concentrate solely on the search engines start getting their comeuppance.

And in direct correlation, it is only a matter of time til those SEMs who focus on customer needs and wants will begin to reap huge rewards.