Google and Personalized Search - Collective Data Borg
January 14th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Google, SEO, ToolsIf 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!
I’m getting pretty in depth in studying the tools and services Google makes available to people with Google accounts. However I came across something today that made me wrinkle my nose and look down over the top of my glasses like my Grandma did when she knew I was telling fibs.
If you want to completely deactivate Google Personalized search results permanently you can do so by visiting this page. However when you do you get this fairly ominous warning
The part that irks me is “you will not be able to access or manage your Search History”. If I wanted Google to save my search history, why am I required to have personalized search rammed down throat, with an all or nothing clause. I could understand if it was the other way around and they said you can’t have personalized searches without storing your browsing history, as there’s an obvious data prerequisite. It would seem to me that Google is trying to force the adoption of personalized search telling you that you can’t have your search history saved without getting personalized results.
However to see what the big issue is lets look at the query that got me started [diet plan]. Now here’s a look my personalized result, sitting right there at #3 is Jeremy Zawodny.
Now if you read Jeremy’s post, yes it is about a diet plan, but let’s be honest, he doesn’t deserve the #3 spot for that one, there’s some back of the house voodoo at work. Let’s turn off personalized search and see what we get
We see now he’s dropped down to number 10. Still a little high but I suspect now just we’re seeing some over zealous authority trust scoring at work. I know who Jeremy is, and he’s not in my feeds in the Google feed reader, however I’m reasonably certain there’s a significant overlap in people who read many of the other search and technology blogs I do and who read his blog. Is it possible that everyone who contributes to the collective Google data borg influences everyone else also in the collective? I don’t have enough data to say with any degree of reliability, however as a concept it makes sense and is not unheard of. In fact it’s very similar in concept to Amazon using the purchases of other customers to recommend books, CD’s and DVD’s to you.
It’s something interesting to think about. If you aren’t even looking at what data Google is gathering and what they are doing I think you should. I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to have an old, established Google account that you can sprinkle with the data of your choosing. I said sprinkle not flood and dump.
Tags: seo, google, personalized+search, jeremy+zawodny
Sphere It
January 14th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
You can turn off personalized search, or pause it I should say without deleting the past.
My question to you is, do you actually think Google is really going to stop collecting this data on you or are they just going to stop showing you what they collect?
I vote for the later.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
WHen I do a query I usually try both ways. Logged in and logged out. I usually get diferent results which always bugs me.
I put more weight into what shows up as I’m logged out.
January 16th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Thanks.
Interesting indeed.
February 13th, 2007 at 8:59 am
This a a load of crap… Why are we being forced to use personalized search?
I visited the link in the front of your post, to remove Personalized Search, and imagine my surprise when I saw this instead of the screen shot you had posted…
“You are trying to remove Search History from your Google account.” along with the rest of an ominous warning.
Well I don’t want to remove my search history altogether, and it looks like this won’t even get rid of personalized search anymore.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Google, like God, knows what’s best for us. If Google says we need to use personalized search then it must be for the best.
On a serious note, we better get over it fast and start focusing on how we stay on the top.