Introducing Google’s New Personalized Search

Google recently made a change to its searching algorithm by adding what they are calling Personalized Search, which may ultimately affect your internet marketing strategies.

The search giant will now list different search results for different people based on both IP address location and previous search history.  This new way of establishing individualized search perameters increases the user experience by providing the search results that are tailored to that particular user.
Here’s how: with Personalized Search, once a user logs into Google, the search terms are tracked in order to determine the most relevant search results based on that individual’s searching trends. For example, ten different people searching the same keyword could get ten completely different search results based on their individual search history. Personalized Search works in this way only if the person is logged into Google. If not, Google looks at the geographic location of the IP address that’s inputting the search term, and tailors the search results to that particular location. If, for example you are located in San Diego and you do a search for “restaurants” you will see the organic results will list local restaurants in or around the city of San Diego.

While this sounds good for individual users, it also benefits Google. Since Google makes money through advertising alone, Personalized Search may increase the need for advertising from companies who want to maintain their status at the top of the search heap. And for web-users, Personalized Search aims to get the most relevant information to the user in the shortest possible way, enhancing Google’s reputation as being user-friendly and consumer-focused.  By listing local business websites within a specific geographic parameter, Google eliminates the need for the user to navigate through a complicated directory, providing relevant geo-targeted results to the user in a much easier and faster way, thus providing a better user experience.

So what does this mean to you and your website?  At the end of the day it is all about the basics: a great user-friendly website, good content, and valuable inbound links.  If you are building your website for both the search engine and the consumer then you will be able to take advantage of Google’s new Personalized Search and gain exposure for your business with organic root term placement.