Anyone seen "Personalized Search"?

[helen]

I just did a search, and this came up for 2 pages, then disappeared again. Has anyone else come across this?

http://www.theoverlands.com/helen/images/library/g_scrsht_personalizedsearch.gif

The link leads to a help page that points people to this page: http://www.google.com/psearch

I'm not sure whether or not to be happy about this. In the long term, strategies like this are good for searchers and businesses because they help drill down to the correct market. But it may certainly make broad based search marketing (SEO, anyway) more difficult in the long run.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[Carlos Chacón]

My thoughts,
Even if the search results will be custom-made by any Google account, the client should did a research first in order to get their “favorites sites”.
And that’s the local SEO strategy that can help our search marketing industry to keep alive.
:)
More info about Personalized Search here (http://www.google.com/searchhistory/privacy.html)

[dannysullivan]

Yes, they've had this feature for over a year. In the example above, I don't think you actually have it switched on. It needs to be enabled. I find it very useful in getting me better results. From an SEO perspective, it does indeed change the rules -- but that's where we are heading, a future where everyone is seeing slightly different results.

[helen]

Thanks... I do remember hearing about it a while back, but I thought it was some obscure service (to the average searching public) that you had to specifically enable, like Google Co-op (mostly used by geeks & SEOs). This was the first time I've ever seen an invitation to use it.

I suppose in the long run, this will probably help the SEO industry - the more specialized search marketing gets, the more we (should be) in demand.