AI-POWERED SEARCH

Personalized search solution by Vue.ai uses AI to make search results accurate and personalized for every shopper.

A personalized search reaches beyond the user’s initial query by incorporating information gleaned from his digital history of interests. There are at least two ways in which personalized search can be delivered: modifying the search query, and re-ranking the search results. The search engines of yore catered to all users in the same way. Not so today. The search engine learns about the user profile from the individual’s search history. This profile is then mapped to a set of categories that the search engine accesses to make sense of the query. In effect, the search engine disambiguates keywords in order to serve up what the searcher is actually looking for. With this level of personalization, search engines provide different results for different searchers.

Google first introduced personalized search in 2004 and began actively implementing it in 2005 in the Google search results. Various factors come into play when personalizing a user’s search results, like the location of the user, the search language and the user web history.

Search engines today want to reach beyond what you type in the search box. They seek to understand what your intent might be in order to give you exactly what you want. Or, what they think you want. To do this they use information you have provided, either wittingly or unwittingly, to create user profiles, or personas. The search engine then utilizes the persona to target information in a way that best serves your perceived interest.

The more often you visit a certain web page, the more Google believes that you like that page. Your behavior is duly noted and used to optimize future search results. The next time you search, a page which you have been previously visiting with regularity is likely to be shown more prominently. Herein lays both advantages and disadvantages of just such a likelihood.

Finding new information becomes a major disadvantage of personalized search. You will be repeatedly shown the same results because that is what you always click on. It’s in your history. This naturally narrows your information exploration on the web. The problem is called ‘filter bubble’ and it means that people are letting search engines decide what the users want to see and what they don’t want to see. In the extreme case the user becomes confined to his own ‘filter bubble’ and is cordoned off from the rest of the information out there on the Internet.

Extrapolate this to a community level, and the consequences become troubling. As certain search results are bumped up and more and more people view them, the favored results become more prominent, and the ones not so favored are removed from the listed search results. When this happens collectively the society as a whole will likely have a skewed perspective of a particular topic. It gets Orwellian without much effort. He who controls the search engine controls information.

Google uses Google News to personalize your search. The first few results for a specific news query would likely be the same to all viewers. But as you scroll down, the results begin to differ. Google takes your past searches into account and your location and gives you local news that may matter more to you. This could be useful. But the potential disadvantage is missing what may be important news from farther afield.

The average person’s attention span is 8 seconds, so personalized search helps to quickly sift through the blocks of data that search engines throw up. Personalization saves time and significantly improves the quality of the search. It can also help search engines display highly targeted (“personalized”) advertising — the best deals, offers and discounts, depending on an individual’s interests – the idea being that the consumer finds what he is looking for faster and with all the relevant information displayed more prominently.

In recent years there's been a lot of discussion about personalized search and a personalized user experience on the web. A few years ago, search engines emphasized their efforts to create more personalized results on the SERP. Personalized search results attempted to connect the information you looked at before and how you interact with the platform to the query you just input, creating an improved and unique user experience.

Lately, however, there's been some pushback on personalized search. Customers began to voice concerns about how their info was stored and the amount of tracking that sites placed on them. If you're a search marketer, odds are you're familiar with the ritual of logging into an incognito browser window to run a Google search query so you can see the universal listing instead of the personalized one.

Recently Google announced it would be stepping back the extent of personalized search, focusing only on location of the user or the searches they made immediately prior to their current search. As a marketer, you want to understand what this means for the trend of personalization throughout the industry. Here is what we think everyone should know. Google’s Pandu Nayak explained Google’s rationale, saying, “A query a user comes with usually has so much context that the opportunity for personalization is just very limited.”

Generally, Google found that SERPs didn't offer much opportunity for effective personalized search. Their efforts did not do much for customers and did not improve the web results displayed. In other words, Google discovered that while their ability to understand the likely intent of certain queries--and thus pair those queries with micro-moments--remains strong, their ability to interpret the individual desires of a particular user was ineffective. People enter queries influenced by a large number of factors which may or may not be connected to their past searches and/or other interactions with Google.

Personalized Search

Search marketers may find that this change makes it easier to track and measure optimization results. There'll be, theoretically, less overall variation in SERP layout between individual searchers, especially in the case of universal listing elements, like Quick Answers and Local 3-Pack. SERPs won't change as much from person to person, customization being limited to the nature of the search query.

For example, the layout and types of content presented for personalized search will still adjust depending upon your vertical searches and efforts to create SERPs that conform to the likely micro-moment. Consider local searches. When a person makes a search with a likely “I-want-to-go” micro-moment, such as “parks near me,” Google focuses on the local 3-pack and score-based, UGC-driven review sites like Yelp.

This has the potential to help with personalized search optimization strategy. Brands can feel more confident that their listings will appear consistently when they achieve a high ranking on universal search results. That in turn will help them accurately measure their ability to interest and engage users. Measurements of the number of times their site will likely appear in organic listings, based on search volume, will be more accurate and can be better compared to their site traffic.

Google will continue to display different SERPs depending upon their understood intent of the user. In other words, users searching for terms that align well with an “I-want-to-buy” micro-moment will see different types of results than those who have searches aligning with “I-want-to-go” micro-moments. This means that as you develop your content, you should also be keeping these different goals in mind. To create content for the right micro-moment, you should spend time researching the likely user intent of your intended audience. Look at the current layout of the SERP for your target keyword and see where you should focus your efforts. You can read more about optimizing for the different micro-moments by reading the following BrightEdge blog posts:

Customers still like knowing that they matter to brands. They want to know that the businesses they buy from cares about helping them personally with their pain points and needs. Finding ways to personalize content on your site for return customers can be enormously beneficial. The individualized experience will boost your engagement rates while also letting customers know that you remember them.

Email allows you to speak directly to prospects and customers one-on-one, which makes it a prime vehicle to personalize your material. For email to successfully engage with prospects, it must be in alignment with their buyer persona and where they are on the buyer journey. A well-run email program will keep people engaged and encourage them to learn more about the brand and keep opening emails. This is an opening for you to continue to nurture them to progress through the sales funnel.

Marketers generally like to use every tool available to get an edge – as they should. A fairly new twist to SEO and online marketing comes about as a result of Google’s increasingly personalized search results. The challenge with these new Google personalized searches is pinning down their accuracy due to the multiplied SERP variations. And that means a tougher time ensuring the search data is right for sound SEO purposes.

Still, effectively leveraging Google’s personalization can give you a definite marketing edge. So let’s see how personalized search results are affected by location, device type, search history, and many more factors.

 Google personalized search results are based on more than the traditional ranking factors like relevance and authority. Personalized results take into account additional information the search engine has about a user at the time of the search, for example, demographics, location, search history, and interests. The putative goal of personalized search is to enhance the relevance of the search results for a particular searcher.