In Greg Linden’s guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that “the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it is all implicit. The current Google Personalized Search likely is using the same Kaltix technology, building a high-level profile of you, then biasing all of your search results based on your long-term behavior.”
With that in mind, it’s curious that just under half (48%) of respondents in this week’s R/WW poll haven’t noticed any difference in their Google search results. Only 12% have seen an improvement, but perhaps of more concern is that 9% say their search results have gotten worse! You can test this yourself by going to googlonymous, which as the name suggests allows you to do an anonymous search on Google (hat tip Mind Booster Noori for the link).
Mind Booster Noori also explained why personalized search results are inferior to him than anonymous results: “Google tends to give me the websites I already visit and know, but when I’m searching for something, I usually want to find something I don’t know of, and Google fails to give me that. For me, usually, the results of a query to Google are better if I’m not logged in.”
Let us know your thoughts on the effectiveness of Google Personalized Search. Don’t forget also to contribute to our poll on this topic:
