Personalised search on Google
23/06/2007
Personalised search on Google
Personalised Search is one of the next developments being gradually rolled out by Google. This month there have been changes to the way on which google.com handles cookies, so that users in (say) the UK are automatically redirected to the Google UK search. Provided this is what you want this is great. This allows Google to better target ads by geographical location.
The above has one problem at the moment – geographical location is determined by IP address which may not be very accurate. As an aside, to insist that you stay on Google.com, type www.google.com/ncr into the browser, and your search will happen on the main Google.com search engine.
Back to personalised search, results may be returned based on your previous search history. This has implications for the SEO industry and measuring a website’s ranking.
Personalised search in terms of how the results are returned is already implemented with choices of numbers of results returned, language preference plus a range of other choices.
But Google is famous for innovation, so in the field of personalised search is working on more ambitious plans. These include the GCSE (not an exam for UK secondary schools) but the Google Custom Search Engine. You can view the beta test release of this at Google Custom Search Engine.
