Several weeks ago now, Google started pushing personalised search by default to holders of Google accounts:
We have two main ways of personalizing your Google experience. First, you can customize products and services like the Google Personalized Homepage. Personalizing your homepage gives you the at-a-glance information that you care about - such as your latest Gmail messages, news headlines, or to-do list = right at your fingertips, just the way you want it.Second, we offer automatic personalization through things like personalized search and recommendations. Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you having to do
any extra work.Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google - one that combines personalized search results and a
personalized homepage.Keep in mind that personalization is subtle - at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends.
Danny Sullivan did the first critique of the new Google personalised search that I saw (no surprise there, then! ;-) which I heartily recommend if this service is new to you and here's another related discussion about customised search engines for a broader view.
Something I haven't seen raised much, if at all (or maybe I just missed it?) in either the library or e-learning blogs I follow are the implications for education when a large number of people start to regularly use personalised search services.
One of the things I've been thinking around for the last year or so is how we can make better use of search and other content/resource discovery strategies for: a) identifying content we can reuse third party materials in our own course materials; b) automatically pulling relevant content into course materials in a 'live' way; c) helping students discover appropriate resources for themselves in effective, efficient and satisfying ways.
For the purposes of the current post (the rise of personalised search), this third factor - helping out students search more effectively for resources - is likely to be affected if consistent Google 'ground truth' results are no longer necessarily what everybody sees if instead they are all receiving personalised/tuned results.
Using Google without signing in will return the 'ground truth' organic search results for a particular Google domain, at least for the foreseeable future, but the presence of effectively persistent identifying cookies on user's personal machines that even there is the opportunity to serve customised search results, as well as personalised adverts.
Conceptually, too, will the rise of personalisation affect the way we regard search engines that offer similar results. One of Google's great selling points has been the quality and persistence (consistency) of the results it returns.
So much so, in fact, that many users use search engines for navigation, as well as the basis of recommendations to other people for how to find a particular site ("just google XYZ and it'll be in one of the top three or four results").
Of course, as educators, we want to develop information skills that enable people to use a wider range of search tools that focus, for example, on academic and commercial content collections (as Beyond Google does, in part).
But we also need to recognise the fact that, at the current time, most of the people, most of the time, use Google (or one of the other major search engines; but predominantly, I think, Google, if my web stats are anything to go by).
Another aspect of Google's personalised search implementation (as I understand it) is that profiling information gleaned from Google Desktop Search and GMail (where available) can be used to further customise Google Personalised Search results.
Academic customisation is presumably a possibility too for published academics. If for example my Google credentials can be correlated with any published papers I have written (along with papers that I have cited - or that have cited me) then this information can be used in turn to personalise results further on academic searches (such as academic/scholar searches or maybe even the book search).
This is the flipside of expert search, where for example I search for a person who is expert on a topic and use their published output as part of the ranking mechanism.
["Searchers like me" - useful for the enterprise?]
On a final note, I posted some days ago about discovered storage, online storage I get 'for free' within any online applications I use. [Here's a link to a graphic the likes of which I wished I'd drawn up to illustrate that post: check it out] It strikes me that personal search histories could be seen to represent pre- or auto-populated hidden storage; that is, storage space that is accessible to me on a 'read' basis, and only indirectly on a 'write' basis (that is, whenever I perform a search/click-through to a site from a link on a Google search results page).
Posted by ajh59 at March 2, 2007 12:40 AM