Personalized search is underway.   There are a few entries into the world of  personalized search.   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

Since writing about this earlier, there have been a couple of entries into the personalized search market. Personalized search for these search engines involves  keeping track of your searching history, and providing related search information. There are three major search engines that are using this type of personalized search, Yahoo, AskJeeves and the newer A9 search engine from Amazon.

Yahoo is the largest of any of these entries into personalized search and has the best chance to make it a useful tool. With Yahoo, you can save your search results to be called up at a later time and share them with other people. This sharing idea is a good one which should help marketers who give good information or service. That means your marketing efforts will expand beyond the web and into your business more and more.

AskJeeves also has a similar personalized search which came out right before Yahoo. It has a similar appeal for saving search history, but it does some more of the legwork in historical searching than Yahoo does. It has a nice clean interface that is not like the other two. The search results with AskJeeves are a nice alternative to the others also.

I haven't used it much, but I'm going to start because the AskJeeves way of personalizing search results is easier and for someone who does a lot of searching, this is a good way to keep track of it all.

The last major entry into the personalized search race is A9 which has a really good look and great options unlike almost any other. A9 is an extension of Amazon, so you know this is also a marketing tool, but it's more than that. A9 brings together some of the best parts of the search experience. The search results are supplied by Google, so you know that you're going to get good results. But what makes it powerful is the way it is all organized. You have web results, image results, history and book results all viewable by a simple click of the navigation buttons on the right. It's the organizational aspects of A9 which make it a powerful search tool. I find it interesting that a third party, none-search entity like Amazon could put together something that rivals almost anything out there! They really didn't invent anything new, they just know what people might want as far as usability, which is huge.

It could be true that doing web promotion may be more difficult than it has been in the past. What I think it does mean to people who want to get higher rankings for their website, is that they must create superior content which will make it more attractive to people searching. So if this theory is true, then webmasters who have been following good practices won't have to worry whether someone is using a personalized search or standard search. As you may have read in some of my other articles, the thing is to create a website that is meant for people, not for search engines. That's what really matters. Does it mean that some of the ways that we've done things in the past will have to change some? Sure, most likely this future trend in search will require some adaptation just like any other changes we experience in life. 

I've mentioned that this will change rankings and how a website might do in the future online. For right now, there isn't any way to know the full impact on whether your website will improve or go down in rankings. The one thing to do, which has always worked in the past, is to create good content for searchers. This approach is something you should already be doing and search engines, whether personalized or not, will reward in the future.