Google Personalised search has not received much press recently but the service is very real and is still being developed and improvements are being made every week.

Personalised search results currently show and increase in search engine position based on user historical search popularity. So in other words the more a user visits a website from Google’s search results, the higher the site will rank within the search results of a future keyword search by that user. We have also noticed an increase in the ranking of pages which are on the same domain as popular search results. Personalised search also allows users to increase the rank of a page manually, to assign their own level of importance. The service can only be used while signed into a Google account. It is also interesting to note that Google is currently displaying a list of search terms which have been used by the personalised search user, to find that specific page and listing. This leads us to surmise that Google is recording this information but for what purpose?

It does seem possible that when Google has enough user data, from personalised search, it could potentially use the data to assign a level of importance and popularity to a website which could then be added into the Google Page Rank algorithm. This could potentially mean that for the first time Page Rank could be based on real time user generated popularity. But this does ask the question “Will this be the death of Page Rank as we know it?” and “Will Search Engine Results be different for each user or will Google amalgamate the data?”

Article by Creative SEO

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