Personalised Search coming to a PC near you!

The idea of personalised search has been around for sometime now, however Google recently announced it's intention to greatly expand the take-up of it's personalised search service. In simple terms,personalised search replaces the searches we all get at the moment via Google, replaced instead with a set of results based upon our individual preferences.

Whilst this may well have a dramatic effect upon how search marketeers operate, the question most people need to know is how are my results personalised? The answer lies in the fact that anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account such as Gmail, Adsense and Google Analytics will automatically be enrolled into three additional products:

Search History

Personalised Search

Personalised Homepage

Obviously it's the first of these three products that will provide the data to feed your personalised search results, you can choose to switch-off Search History, although it's worth noting that whilst the data will not therefore be used to serve up personalised results the information is still stored by Google for use in aggregate form.

From a search marketing perspective, the expansion of personalised search should not be too problematic if you have a quality site, you just need to make it easy for users to add your site to their personalised pages by offering functionality such as Add To Google buttons.

Danny Sullivan has posted a comprehensive review of the changes and how to manage them over at Search Engine Land.