Google – What You See Is What You Get
or Is it? Google is now serving personalized search results to everyone…
There have been a number of changes in the way that Google displays search results. These changes are subtle and have been rolled out slowly over the past months. If you care about where your website or information about your business surfaces online, you will want to know this…
Kulick & Horling, both Googlers, declared online that Google now uses browser cookies to trend your search behaviour. By tracking what you search for, and what website links you choose on search engine results pages (SERPS). Google is massaging the results in hopes of giving you what you need. Good accurate search results = happy searcher = return to Google for future search. If you have a Google account, and you are logged into it while you surf, Google is collecting more than just your search behaviour. They are tracking your web surfing history, even after you leave Google. Using this collected data Google can further manipulate the search results that they serve you.
Incidentally, any web developer can use cookies to store information about your surfing behaviour while you visit their website. The data stored in cookies, which are tiny text files that reside on your own computer, can not be read by different domains. So Google can not read cookies from other websites and vice versa other websites can not read Cookies by Google.com.
“Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser,” wrote Google’s Bryan Horling, Software Engineer and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager.
Here is a scenario for you, to help you understand what this all means. A website owner checks the position of their site often by entering keywords into Google Search. Google returns a search result and while the website owner is there there, they will often check their competitors websites out. Let’s say that this website owner loves their own website – but never visits it from the Google search result. This behaviour could potentially teach Google that your competitors website is more relevant to you than your own website. Given a similar pattern over a period of time and you could find that your own site is slipping lower and lower on the search result page. How Google interprets the general behaviour gleaned from a large sample of users who search the same keywords is yet to be seen… or perhaps already being seen?
You can clear your web browsers cookies. I won’t get into that here… but if you Google it… you are sure to get the right results… custom tailored to meet your needs based on your previous search behaviour.
Google does have a page that descirbes “Personalized Search” here. They point out the difference between logged in to your Google account and not. – - http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54041
Google does allow people to turn off web history from within their Google account. A regular deleting of Cookies from your web browser may be a good habit too.
David West
