StandardsGirl.com – Views From Within

A Better Solution To Personalization

More personal opinion than a professionally reasoned post, but wondering your thoughts on this.

I just returned from PubCon – ok so I live in Vegas and returning just means driving home, but when I got back to my computer and started reading posts from the conference I started to see many comments on personalization and the future of search and that got me thinking about the subject from a personal level.

While personalized search sounds all warm and gooey, I know I currently deactivate all forms of obviously tracked search (note the key term there is obvious). Yet despite my attempts, I have recently noticed Google has cookied my browser despite my desire to hide my personal search preferences and get results that are not based on what Google thinks I want, but rather what is actually there. This troubles me, as I believe I am better at discerning what results are relevant to me than Google is, just as I dislike Microsoft for attempting to determine what my user actions are when using their products (has anyone ever almost thrown their computer into the street when attempting to eliminate autocorrect options!?).

So here is my question to Google and Matt Cutts and whoever else is out there – what if you do not want personalized or behavior based results? What if I want to determine which results are relevant to me? What if I like getting some irrelevant results because they lead me down paths I might never have thought of before? Will the search engines offer this option to users like me? Or will we all be stuck with user based results that while relevant to one aspect of our search lives, is not relevant to others?

Personalized Search Is Awesome! Why Do You Care?

Why do I ask these questions? Because as many people, I have a diverse set of life scopes. I am a doctoral student with an interest in political communication and linguistics, an SEO/Site Design Specialist and a person with a variety of interests from science to art to pop culture. None of my searches are relevant to each other and even in the space of the role I am searching on, I want to filter the results based on what I feel is relevant. In my studies on linguistics and political communication I might be searching for George Lakoff and Karl Rove along with Marketing Communications – while this is all relevant to my doctoral thesis, if personalization is in place how will the search engine know that today I want marketing communications related to political cycles vs marketing communications related to site promotion? I wish I could pose this question to the engines directly because, as mentioned, I still feel that I am the best judge of what is relevant to me.

One More Thought…

And one more quick note on this idea of personalization, once I do have search based on personalization, how do I share information with others in daily conversation? At this time, I can be speaking with a friend and say, oh yeah I went to Google and found this great site. My friend will invariably ask, what site? And I will invariably have no idea what exact the URL is, so usually they next question they will ask me, what did you search for? At which point, I usually can remember the basic search and with some jiggering they can find what I was thinking about. However, with personalization will this method of casually sharing information become meaningless. When I say search for A will they get B because their A has a different interpretation? This makes me wonder is this the case of the industry believing they are answering a need in a way that will cause more problems than it solves?

Proposed Solution

So what other methods could Google, MSN and Yahoo utilize that allow for personalization, yet offer up results based on the true return? My thought is that it might be better to offer people the ability to create a list of results they like in their own account (their own search engine per se of their results), but still serve up the standard results to everyone else. Wouldn’t it be great to click on an icon in a Google result and add an item to your own results? Then you can go back later and review? Rather than have an internet filter based on behaviors or personalization that may be irrelevant?

Or what if Google integrated its “create your own search engine” into iGoogle? Where a user could create search results based on very specific query interests in an isolated search query (different from refined or advanced search)? Or what if you have two options? Turn on and off search personalization at the click of a button? Unfortunately, being forcefed results is unnerving to me, because no matter how good an algorithm might be and no matter how great the people that create it, as a user it can never truly understand what I want or how getting what I don’t want affects my own experience and that could be I find a whole new area to search I had never thought of before.

Conclusion & Disclaimer

So to conclude – it seems Google, MSN, Yahoo all the search engines are assuming all users want these types results, but what about those of us who do not? How will that effect this “revolution”? How will you address our needs? Or will this allow a new browser to emerge, one that offers us both the simple options of a true result and a personalized one?

Of course, I am no expert in search engine algorithms and am only writing as a user from the user perspective. My ideas on better methods for personalization may be way out of the scope of what Google, MSN and Yahoo know what users want. And of course as an SEO, it serves better to have a standard web, but I am coming from the point of a user who thinks, I want to decide what works best for me. Please Google, do not take my unfiltered internet away.

Just curious on your thoughts…you can answer the poll and/or leave comment…

Thanks!!