The new trend in personalized search.  AskJeeves.com and A9.com are one new way to search.     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

As search marketers, we should be concerned about any new changes that could affect how well our websites are ranking. We should always have a childlike curiosity of the new trends in search so we can adjust to them. I'm seeing a first wrinkle or trend in this whole personalized search that the search engines have been talking about. How will it affect websites we manage? No one knows for sure yet but here are a couple of personalized search sites that are certainly the first of more to come.

A9.com is a new search engine that has been put out by Amazon. A9 is really a more organized Google search, because they're taking search results directly from the Google search engine and organizing it better. Here is a screenshot of A9's personalized search:

You'll find that he searches you do are put into a historical search record and you can look at what you searched for in the past. It also has results from Amazon's inside the book text search. This is where Amazon shines in getting people to look at information that they can buy from them. After all, A9 is a marketing tool as much as it is a search engine and for those businesses who can provide search with their offering, that means more business! It's a nice search engine but it really is kind of a Google on steroids, giving you a power of a more personalized search experience. As a search marketer, it means we must give more time and attention to how those search results sitting in someone's history will be used. It's more important than ever to have content that people will refer back to and will be easy to identify in a list or history. One of the other things that is nice is the diary feature where searchers can make comments about a website they visited and keep it for future reference. As more and more websites seem similar, this is a way for people to remember their experience with your website.

Another personalized search that has just  come out that is similar to A9 is AskJeeves.com, but with a few differences. AskJeeves has also done an organized search but using their own search results and without some of the marketing push at people like A9. Like any of these new personalized search engines, you must sign up for the service, but it's no big deal. Once you do, AskJeeves can keep a history of searches and you can organize them into folders referring back to them in the future. It's probably the better of the two because it is a pure search engine, not looking to sell you something directly. Here's a screenshot of what you find in the user area:

Here you can see that I've done a couple of searches today and I've stored them into folders. If you were doing research on a project, the folders are a nice way to have a record of your sources. Although it may not look like all that much, it gives you what you need to have an enhanced web experience. AskJeeves has made a significant step as they offer good search results and are taking a first step before other major competitors into this personalized search arena. As a marketer, AskJeeves is a search engine to watch and to pay attention to the results it gets for you. 

So what do these new trends signal and how will it affect your website? 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. If you need help in marketing your website for this new trend, make sure you take a look at our website analysis to start on your way to better online results.