Comments on: Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search?

By: Rob Green

Rob Green — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:15:38 +0000

@Dan – I think that’s a good idea to test, and it avoids sending people to the SERP where they could get lost.

@Jonaths – From what I have seen, the personalisation of a results page only seems to favour a site that you have clicked through to from another (or the same) SERP. For what I was describing, the visit to the site wouldn’t have to be a bounced visit – but how much would a bounce from a site negatively affect a site’s ranking (in terms of Vince), against the potentially positive effect of you having visited that site (in terms of personalisation).

Now I am getting confused as well!?!

By: Jonaths

Jonaths — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:14:06 +0000

I could be way off here (I normally am), but from what I’ve seen I wouldn’t say personalised search is query dependent, just visit dependent. So imagine you regularly visit http://www.example.com, and that page has content for “widgets”, but you’ve never visited http://www.example.com/widgets, and you’ve certainly never Googled “example widgets”. So the first time you do a search for “widgets”, Google artificially increases the rankings for http://www.example.com/widgets.

As you say, if someone searches for “example widget” and then bounces, then that perhaps isn’t a great signal that http://www.example.com should rank for “widgets”. But having said that, isn’t that exactly how Vince works? I’m confusing myself now.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:40:16 +0000

I wonder if I’m Feeling Lucky, or Address Bar searches count?

You could put I’m feeling lucky links in all your email marketing:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bbc+news&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Address bar searches seem to use gfns=1 to auto redirect to the first result:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=0&q=bbc+news

Would be worth checking out.