Personalized Search - All's Well or Orwell?	Visited: 1285 4.0/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Scott Buresh July 18, 2007

Scott Buresh

Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott’s articles have appeared in numerous publications, including PromotionWorld, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, SEO Today, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, Cirronet, and DS Waters. Download Medium Blue's latest exclusive whitepaper, "Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix," for more insight.

Scott Buresh has written 37 articles for PromotionWorld.

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You go to Google and enter your search term. Big Brother, the totalitarian character from George Orwell's novel 1984, watches with detached interest. You see, to Big Brother, you are only a number - but he'd like to know as much about you as he can. Knowing you allows Big Brother to do many things - both good and evil.

Alright, enough of the "Big Brother" comparison - it's been done many times before (and done many times better). However, there is an important central point to be made about personalized search. Search engines are now collecting data on individual users, and they are assuming that users will trust them with this data to "Do No Evil," as the famous Google slogan goes. Only time will tell whether the trust is well-placed or if people are willing to trust engines with this type of data at all.

The basic principle behind personalized search is simple. When you go to a search engine and type in a search query, a cookie (the term is derived from "magic cookie," which is what programmers named a recallable packet of data) is placed on your machine that gives you a unique identifier. As you return to the engine, a profile of your search habits is built up over time, assuming that you haven't deleted the cookie. With this information, a search engine like Google or Yahoo can understand more about your interests and serve up more relevant search results.

For instance, let's say that you have shown an interest in the topic of sport fishing in your search queries, while your neighbor has shown an interest in musical instruments in his search queries. Over time, as these preferences are made clear to the engine, your personalized search results for the term "bass" will largely be comprised of results that cover the fish while your neighbor's results for "bass" will be comprised of results that primarily cover the musical instrument.

For search engine optimization firms, the major shift brought about by personalized search will be in how they report on ranking data to clients. When collecting this data, they will have to run from a "clean" machine - that is, one that has no cookies on it. The baseline results that are reported to the client will basically be a snapshot of what a search engine user would see if they were using the engine for the first time. The good news is that people who have shown an interest in certain products and services will likely have results more favorable to the client than the baseline results indicate, since personalized search assures that their search histories will be reviewed and the results likely skewed toward the client's industry. The bad news is that the search engine optimization firm will be hard-pressed to demonstrate this - not to mention that the results that the client has on its own personal machines will almost certainly not match up with the results that the firm is reporting (although the client machines should have better results, for the same reasons cited above).

Some people find the practice of storing information for personalized search purposes disturbing; others find the end result to be useful (still others find themselves experiencing an odd combination of both reactions). In defense of the engines, it is not as if they are building a dossier on individuals - again, you are only a number to them. However, the potential for misuse of the data is fairly high.

There are many advertising firms out there already that go through the cookies on your machine to figure out which ads will have the best effect on you. If you've ever been on a website and seen a banner ad that is directly related to something you have been doing research on lately, it is most likely not a coincidence. The ad platform simply browsed through the cookies on your machine to find out what topic held your interest, and dropped in a related ad once it determined what that topic was. Search engines have been buying firms with this technology lately; notable recent purchases include that of DoubleClick by Google and aQuantive by Microsoft. There seems to be little doubt that your search history will be combined with existing ad-serving technology to deliver even more relevant ads. Whether this constitutes misuse seems to be debatable - some people seem to have no problem with it while it makes many others fairly uneasy.

Privacy issues that arise from personalized search are also a big question. The EU recently announced that it is probing into how long Google stores user information (this probe was subsequently extended to include all search engines). AOL recently committed a serious blunder when it released search data from 500,000 of its users, and it was discovered that it was fairly easy to identify many people by the search terms that they use (anybody ever "ego surf"- that is, type your own name into a search engine to see what comes up? If so, you wouldn’t be hard to spot). In addition, since the IP address of the computer creating the query is also reportedly tracked, a court order forcing the engine and the ISP (Internet Service Provider) to provide specific search data on individuals is a distinct possibility - the technology required to deliver upon such a demand is already in use.

Unless the government intervenes, the question will probably be decided by personal preference. As it becomes more common knowledge that the engines store this type of data to enable personalized search, many users will take measures to block its use. These measures are fairly easy, such as setting your Internet security settings to high and never accepting cookies, but also create inconveniences elsewhere - some sites will not even function properly if you have your security settings cranked up to 11.

Are the search engines that collect this data "Doing No Evil?" The answer, I believe, will depend on each individual’s definition of evil. In the meantime, don't be surprised when you type in a search query, and the engine seems to be reading your mind. It isn't, really - it's merely parsing through your memories.