Getting personal, the next thing in search.   Personalized search, how will it affect your website?   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

There's been a lot of talk lately about the latest trend in search technology, personalized search. This is where a search engine will generate search results based on information about you. There are already some versions of this where Google asks a few personal questions, like occupation or interests, which affect the search engine results. Although this has been the greatest extent to this type of personalized search, it's not what the trend is all about. Personalized search will involve keeping track of your searching history, a scanning of your hard drive for what type of information you have there and creating an algorithm of search that will be adjusted for your interests.  

I don't know about you, but having search engines know even more about us than they do already is not something I really want, but the concept of personalizing search in intriguing. Having a search engine that knows some of the things you might be searching for even before you ask for it might be helpful. It will probably make some of the more obscure information we all might want to find, easier. This is a technology that every search engine is racing to develop and deliver to your desktop. The biggest question is, what will this do to search results and will it help or hurt your website's rankings?

It could be true that doing web promotion may be more difficult than it has been in the past. I think that search engines are trying to find ways to eliminate spam sites that have been using unethical techniques to fool them in the past. If it means getting rid of those kind of techniques, making them obsolete, then I'm all for it. 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. 

There are a couple of search engines you could try to get a feel for what might be on the way for all the search engines soon. A9.com is an offering from Amazon which does use some Google technology but also has a component of personalized search. It requires a login and then keeps track of search history, but I don't think the algorithm changes, it simply gives you other information based on what you've search for. There is something else out there that is more like what is coming up, that's Blinkx.com. It requires a download of software just like any other program. Once it installs, it indexes documents on your hard drive and lets this information be used to help you find what you're looking for online. There was a problem for me when I tried to use it, the indexing hung and wouldn't finish the indexing. So it didn't work for me on my machine at home, but I will try it at the office. Blinkx is what we're really talking about in personalized search and it's the first one I've seen right now.

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.