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July 20th, 2006 
QuadsZilla Today I was doing a google search for:
“how do i add a feedburner feed to technorati”
and the top result was one of my seoblackhat posts! I’m like “WTF?”
Then I saw “Turn OFF Personalized Search (Beta) for these results »” on top of the the sponsors on the right. Ah HA! Google noticed that I went to seoblackhat often and decided that a result from that site might be most relevant to me. Obviously, when I turned OFF Personalized Search, I was no longer #1 – as my post was not all that relevant to my query.
This type of personalization will certainly make the popular sites even more popular. What’s your take on personalized search?
Posted in 
If you search for something new… It seems to me that it has little effect at first, because it’s a neighborhood. It might pay to have a PPC listing for the most generic of terms instead of the generic long-tail “transactional” terms.
This PPC visit might help you rank higher on subsequent searches and query refinements as the person gets closer to the purchase.
If you pay for a visit for something generic like “Widgets” or whatever, you might have better luck getting them for free on the long tail “transactional” terms like “Brand X Blue Widgets” when they are ready to buy something. I have no idea if that will pay off in the long run for a small advertiser though.
I know of some people who have had success optimizing and monetizing websites for the long tail searches. A four word query like “Brand X Blue Widgets” is much easier to rank well for than the single word “Widgets” These Niche websites might start to disappear.
The Personalized Results seems designed to reinforce the “Mathew effect” where a disproportionate level of attention goes to people who are already famous and not necessarily to people who might be more relevant and deserving of the attention.
Well, now spammers are using comment-spam etc. to get links so if the “Personalized Search” factor becomes big enough we’ll just begin to see tools that somehow makes users visit the pages in the background and when computers are idle etc.
I can already imagine new features in adware. There’ll be a lot of ways to abuse such systems… But they might be a bit harder than comment-spam.
Hawaii SEO > Interesting point about using PPC to get good rankings on the long tail..
Do think this is designed to work for people who don’t clear their cookies
or do you think Google are IP tracking all visitors???
I really hate it. Last week I was just checking the serps of my “impossible” keyword.. and i was 4th… I almost cried lol. Then I realized of the “Turn OFF” shit. DAMN!.
Btw… a couple of months ago I wasn’t logged in Google, and I spent the whole afternoon looking for VB source codes for a lil tool. Then by mistake i put the general “source code” keyword and guess what… i got a VB result with the EXACT source code I was looking for. I tried it later and I did got the real results…. I felt really paranoid, specially cuz I wasn’t logged in.