What if you had to optimize your Web site to suit not one Google search algorithm but 100 million subtly different ones?
That nightmare scenario was raised pretty quickly by an announcement from Google in early February that it was finally ready to bring out of beta a unified platform for tailoring natural search results to users’ preferences by looking at their past search behaviors, among other criteria.
The search marketing community reacted to the news by forking into two very separate camps:
- This changes everything and will lead to disaster for search marketers, so Google should scrap it.
- This changes everything in ways that will prove wonderful for search marketers, so they should embrace it.
With time comes wisdom, or at least common sense, and three weeks after the news of Google Personalized Search was first posted in the company’s blog, it’s beginning to look like the claims of paradigm shift may be just more overreaction to Google moves. In other words,
- This won’t substantially affect the results that the majority of Google users see now or in the near future. But it’s the way search is headed—toward greater personal relevance—so marketers should get used to it and make the most advantage they can of it.
In brief, Google Personalized Search offers to keep track of users’ search history and to serve up future search results with an eye toward what kind of results users have clicked on in the past. To roll all the clicheed examples into a big ball, say you’re a guitar-playing music lover who’s also into basketball. In that case, your personalized Google search on “bass seal nike” would be much more likely to produce results that include the singer Seal, bass guitars and sports shoes (if such Web content exists) than a personalized search by your scuba-diving, British ale-swilling, nuclear-weapons-engineer neighbor.
“Our goal…is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you having to do any extra work,” Sep Kamvar, Google engineering lead for personalization, said in a post on the official Google blog.
In addition to keeping tabs on the type of sites you click on in search results, the new Google personalized search also looks at what content you’ve got on your customized Google home page and what results you click on within that content. This page, much like the Yahoo! home page, lets users gather functions and content on a single interface so they can read news headlines, track RSS or blog feeds, check their Gmail accounts and use special Web-based gadgets from a single location. That homepage content will also affect how Google interprets a personalized search, so that a user with financial news on a homepage but no sports might get results from Barrons rather than Baseball Weekly when searching on “bonds”.
Google will also look at the Web sites users have entered into the Google Bookmarks section of their Google toolbar—although there’s some question about how many users even know that feature exists.
There’s some speculation too that in the future Google will be able to personalize search results based on the RSS feeds users have subscribed to in Google Reader, another element on the personalized home page. For now, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
All this leads to the first unanswered question about the impact of this personalized search. To get a search customized for their interests, users will have to register for and sign into a Google account—something they now do any time they use Gmail, AdWords or AdSense, Google Analytics, the personalized home page or other functions. New registrants will find the personalization features turned on by default, and in fact might have to work hard to disable them. But long-standing users will have to go in and turn on those settings manually. They can do that by clicking on a “personalize this page” link on the classic white Google search home page, assuming that they know what that refers to.
But many users may be wary of giving Google reasons to watch their past search practice for future use. Some may remember the furor that erupted last summer when AOL released to researchers “anonymized” search paths that weren’t actually anonymous enough to keep the New York Times from tracking those searches back to Georgia grandmothers and others. Many users know that Google and the rest keep search data; U.S. Justice Dept. subpoenas revealed that fact back in 2005. But users may also believe that not turning on personalized search will at least keep those search records buried a few strata deeper inside the Google database.
Some users have also indicated they may not want future searches to be driven by past results. As one user commented on a blog post about the new personalized Google search, “Just because I ordered my Coke with extra ice yesterday doesn’t mean I want it that way for the rest of my life.”
Dave Castle, national accounts manager for OneUpWeb, describes himself as both a fisherman and a musician. “So I could find myself searching Google for Bass Pro Shops one day, but the next time I might want to see music for a bass guitar,” he says. “I actually appreciate the open-ended nature of Web search, and I don’t think people want to be forced down a particular path.”
And that’s just the reaction from users who know how search algorithms work. Studies indicate that other less savvy users believe the results they unearth in Google, Yahoo! or the search engine of their choice are totally “objective” and “unbiased”. Never mind the fact that a search on the same term can pull up very different results pages on the top four engines. At least part of the public seems to feel about search engines the way they feel about members of Congress: that is, they’re all flawed except their own representative.
So user acceptance of search personalization is an open question. And even those who adopt it probably won’t see detectable impact until they’ve amassed a certain amount of search-click history that Google can apply. Given those qualifiers, what does this new personalization—aspects of which have been in beta since last June—mean for marketers who optimize their sites to rank high in organic search?
When the impact kicks in, Web site owners may find that it’s a wash, Castle says: that they may lose traffic or rankings on the single keyword “bass” but should actually pick up traffic on “bass guitar”, assuming they’re offering high-quality content and optimizing for the more specific phrase.
“If you’re promoting a quality Web site with content that people want to click on, this personalized search may wind up helping you in the end,” he says. “The people this trend is going to hurt are the small sites and SEO firms that can’t keep up with the trend or who are not offering quality content.”
In other words, your best strategy may be the same one you use for optimizing for non-personalized search: good content and a targeted approach to keywords.
Dave Berkowitz, director of strategic planning for search marketing firm 360i, is of pretty much the same opinion. For one thing, even those users with a registered Google account may still conduct many of their searches on the basic www.google.com start page, which requires no registration. He thinks the users most likely to be searching while logged in are those with a Gmail account. And while that Google service has a lot of momentum, he points out, the “tens of millions” of Gmail users Google claims are still running well behind the users of Yahoo! Mail or MSN’s Hotmail.
For another thing, optimizing for the possible variations in personalized search is close to mathematically impossible. “I had a friend at UC Berkeley calculate the possible permutations for a search that could have 25 links—a totally arbitrary number-- show up in the ten slots on a Google results page,” Berkowitz says. “The total worked out to about 11.9 trillion possibilities.”
“If you go on doing [optimization] right, you’re going to capture most of the interested audience,” Berkowitz says. “If you’re not as visible to an occasional personal searcher here or there, you just have to hope it averages out in your favor.”
That jibes with what Matt Cutts, senior Google engineer, who was the keynote conversation at the London session of Search Engine Strategies two weeks ago. Where optimizing for a trophy keyword in general search produces a few big winners and lots of losers, he said, “Now you can target specific niches, and everyone can rank in some niche.” The important step, he said, will be figuring out those niches and targeting them properly.
Berkowitz agrees. Search marketers who have been aggressively pursuing the long tail of search with ten thousand keywords in their lists may be ahead of the curve should the search audience begin to fragment, he says. “In fact, it may work to search marketers’ advantage,” he says. “If they start getting less traffic from a key term [as a result of personalized search], that term may turn out to cost through the roof.” So personalization, combined with a long-tail approach and some careful monitoring, could actually help sharpen marketers’ targeting skills.
In any case, search marketers should accept that personalization will be offered. And of course, if Google’s efforts win a following, Yahoo! and MSN Search can tailor searches for their registered users too.
If users take to personalized natural search, what are the chances Google or the other search engines will start applying personalization to the pay-per-click ads displayed on their search results pages? Pretty good, according to John Tawadros, COO of search marketing firm iProspect.
“I think it’s inevitable,” he says. “The moment I can understand search intent, which is the Holy Grail, then I can start fine-tuning that ad delivery. That’s a natural fit.”