Personalized Search - The Feature No one is Asking For
February 8th, 2007 by Michael Gray in GoogleIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
As the debate over personalized search continues I asked myself this question, is anyone one really asking for personalized search results?
In all of my thousands of searches over multiple years I’ve never said “hmm you know what would make this results page better, if Google was to give me completely different results than the guy next to me, boy that would be just swell”. I’ve never met a business owner who’s said “man you know what, I wish the search engines could create anarchy by making sure no two people got the exact same results for the exact same search, that would be the best thing since sliced bread”. I’ve never met a single person who’s said “wow searching for something at home gives me different results than searching for something at work, that’s not confusing at all, in fact I think that’s an improvement, why can’t my calculator work like that”.
Let’s get to the real heart of the matter who wants personalized search, Gord Hotchkiss has the answer Personalized Search Brouhaha
In three interviews with usability people at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, when I asked them about the biggest challenge to overcome, they all pointed to getting away from the current paradigm of a query box and a standard set of results.
There you have it, who wants things to change the search engines. Which is great because you know they don’t want to confuse things they want to help us and make things better, simple and easy to understand. They just want to improve the user experience. It’s not like they would decide to give us information about who links to our site and then the next day say oh yeah all that data we just gave you is for entertainment purposes only, because we might or might not actually be using it.
Let’s see what other services can be improved with personalized results … maybe your bank statement, 17 is your favorite number right so why don’t they put some extra 17’s in there because personalized results are always better aren’t they? What else … hmm … I use the letter “M” alot according to my keyboard history log so why not mix in a couple of “M”‘ grades on my kids report cards that should make me happy and improve my end user experience.
So he Google stop forcing these “improvements” down on people who really don’t really understand what personalized search is, just because you think it’s better for them. Secondly stop hiding the fact that you are doing this by removing the notification. Lastly stop making it so difficult to opt out, by requiring people to log in/out or nuke search history to avoid it. Clearly all that can’t be good for the end user, don’tcha think?
Sphere It
February 8th, 2007 at 2:02 am
Michael, only you could get 10x more backlinks and then take my reminder that it’s a raw list of links and twist that into the data being “for entertainment purposes”. For that, I salute you.
The backlinks that we’re now giving are a lot more data, and we’re going to give even more backlink data over time.
I understand that you like the idea of “everyone should see the same 10 results for a query.” But Google hasn’t worked like that for quite some time. For example, people search from different countries, and not every person wants the same 10 results for, say, [football].
Which is the better result for the query [football]? nfl.com or thefa.com, which is the official home of the England football team? It sort of depends on whether you’re Michael Gray or David Naylor, eh?
February 8th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Well how about you give the people searching on Google.co.uk the thefa.com and the people on google.com the nfl.com ?
As for giving me more data, showing me data that doesn’t do anything certainly isn’t productive or helpful, but it certainly is more
February 8th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I’m glad you said it. Personalized Search is excessive meddling.
I want the same results as the next guy! Engines shouldn’t assume I’m too dumb to put together a few keywords to help myself narrow down to the results I’m looking for.
The biggest problem I see here is Google/others making assumptions about what kind of search I’m doing based on my preferences the previous day/year. There is no way for them to know what I’m looking for - they can assume but they’ll be wrong and I’ll have a worse user experience at Google as a result.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
It’s interesting you know. There are 2 extremely popular shows on TV and both of them have a following. You’ve probably heard of them, the first is ‘24′ and the second is ‘Lost’. Though they both are the type of show that requires you to have seen the previous episode to fully comprehend what is going on, both have a different approach to reaching their audience. ‘24′ for example, has done the same thing since day 1. It respects it’s audience and gives them what they came to see. It knows that after this many seasons, if someone is watching, they are dedicated and it works to reward that dedication by giving them what they are after.
‘Lost’ on the other hand reaches out differently. It started out in the same fashion, but after a while they became nervous because of the uncertainty of how to sustain the popularity it had incurred. Thus began the slippery slope.. They began treating their audience like children and consistently dumbed it down. The easier they thought they were making it, the less they were respecting their intended audience and the more people fell out of love with the show.
It’s simple really. Don’t treat your audience with disrespect and they won’t disrespect you. You can justify it to hell and back but pointing out that European’s have different meanings for Football than most Americans doesn’t make us think personalized search is a great idea. It just makes you seem… well.. Lost.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
You hit the nail on the head. Who the heck WANTS this? I certainly don’t. As far as I’m concerned, Google’s dishing out anything but accurate search results with this Big Brother approach.
I sure didn’t ask for it.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Actually, I’ve long thought that nfl.com should be the result on google.us, thefa.com should be the result on google.co.uk and google.com should return a page discussing the different usages of the word ‘football’ across the world.
But obviously thats never going to happen…
February 11th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Wait, you mean you wouldn’t want your accountant to treat you differently from everyone else? You wouldn’t want your kids’ teacher to cater to the individual needs of your child? You wouldn’t want the mechanic to answer questions related to YOUR car rather than to some generic ‘car’?
People don’t ask for these things because they assume they don’t need to. If you’re a pop music fan from the 80’s you assume that pretty soon your friends aren’t going to stop you everytime you mention “madonna” and ask “do you mean the singer or the mother of christ?”
Similarly, regardless of which country you live in, if you turned up to the sporting goods store with a round black&white ball under your arm and a FIFA World Cup shirt on and asked to see the football boots, you’d expect that the guy at the shop would assume you meant ’soccer’.
February 11th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I want people to treat me differently not machines. They aren’t smart enough and I don’t want to be on the learning curve.
February 13th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Hey Google, really want to “improve my experience”? Let me CHOOSE.
The inability for me to easily turn off personalized search is inexcusable, and frankly, I’m surprised to see that Matt doesn’t agree 100%.
If personalized search was so smart, then it would KNOW that I don’t want it. Do you suppose with enough blog posts and negative comments about personal search, it would just stop working for me?