SEOh My F**cking God!

Googles SearchWiki, Customized and Personalized Results

Agenda info is here.

Google’s SearchWiki, Customized & Personalized Results - SearchWiki, Google Personalized Results and search customization based on previous queries or geographic location are all ways that Google’s “regular” results seem to be disappearing. This session looks at how “one-size-fits-all” results at Google are continuing to disappear, along with strategies on how to be successful in a more personalized results environment.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

Speakers:

Corey Anderson, Manager SearchWiki, Google Inc.
Bryan Horling, Software Engineer, Personalized Search, Google, Inc.

There were two short presentations, but the primary focus of the session was Q&A.

• The same question kept getting asked in different ways: How much is this going to affect search? The given answer was not much, but #1 position is no longer going to be winner-take-all. In my opinion, this is an important concept. Ranking will have a place, but it will mean so many different things that SEOs should no longer be relying on it as a metric.
• There is no correlation between customized searches and AdWords. Nor is there, for the time being (which was said with raised eyebrows by the Google folks), is there any correlation to Google Checkout.
• Danny sees big SEO and commercial opportunities with SearchWiki. At the bottom of the results page where is says “see SearchWiki results,” most of the categories are empty. Of course, nearly all of the SEO categories are full, dominated primarily by Aaron Wall and the SEOmoz folks.
• So far, SearchWiki has been used predominately for personal use. also, for the majority of searches there are no SearchWiki results.
• Malicious comments can be voted down and flagged as inappropriate. Google is claiming that spamming and malicious attacks are not yet a problem, but they are obviously going to be at some point soon. Google’s reply to Rae Hoffman’s question about how Google plans to control these attacks was non-specific and pretty unsatisfactory.
• When search history is deleted, is it really erased? Yes, but only in the places where the data could possibly be associated with any of your personal information. The data is kept elsewhere for other reasons (trending, quality control, etc.).
• Does Google’s Personalized Search interact with SearchWiki? Yes, but only in an indirect sense. If you were to vote a result to the top, this action would trump other triggers. In other words, explicit triggers trump implicit triggers.
• There is not always a personalized search link at the top right of the SERP (to indicate that the result has been personalized) . Google will sometimes modify/alter a search without notifying the user. Google feels that it’s not worth telling the user unless the modification is significant.

-Drew

Tags: google personalized search, google searchwiki, SMX West 2009