Search Engine Personalization Simplified
Not being able to see the forrest for the trees is a sympton many developers and analysts fall into. Search engine personalization is one such area. I think everyone would like to personalize their results (to some extent): that's a no-brainer. But at the same time, everyone knows there will always be a way to manipulate every search ranking algorithm the SEO Gods come up with. So what's the common thread of search personalization?

Finding relevant content, which translated into it's simplest definition means, getting rid of the garbage that fills much of our search results.

Being the well-rounded educated marketers and business types you are, you've probably seen your Google results fill up with sites that do nothing but scrape the results for the exact query you're executing, and create a static page with the search term in the url. Then, Bam! Nothing but crap!~

What if Google puts a checkbox next to each url that excludes that site or url from all your future searches? Then the data is stored in your Google preferences, and you won't be bothered by domains or urls that are full of meaningless content.

Why worry about social networks and determining what the user likes and doesn't like based on traffic patterns? That's all convoluted and too easily manipulated based on bots. This preference would be user specific. It's just like the ability to make your default search results 20 instead of the standard 10. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest and this is just a thought and not gospel by any means.

Jason Dowdell | permalink | +marktd |