Personalized Search

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

If you’ve shopped the Etsy marketplace, you can see how successful the site has been with applying personalization to re-engage customers each time they set virtual foot in the “lobby.” Based on people’s recent searching, browsing, and buying activity, Etsy showers them with sure-to-entice product and shop recommendations, even items from relatively local sellers (within their state). 

People are continually seeking all kinds of media content online—news, live-streamed or taped sporting events, cultural events such as dance presentations and concerts, songs, movies, videos. And they expect that the most relevant, freshest content will be available to them in real time, in an instant, regardless of their physical location and the time of day.

This means personalization on media sites and apps is every bit as critical as it is for  ecommerce and marketplace applications. Media site and app personalization gives users content that reflects what they’re most likely to be interested in watching, listening to, or reading on their device of choice. Personalized recommendations and other tools can keep news and entertainment junkies coming back to see what else they could enjoy on their device of choice.

Companies in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) world can put personalization to work in a uniquely important way: by giving their customer-support and business teams quick access to material they’ve accessed and engaged with the most often, as well as information that’s tailored to their roles (for example, a tech support rep vs. a salesperson). With the right details at their fingertips, company reps can improve their efficiency at enlightening users and prospective customers who need guidance. Better yet (or perhaps in addition), people seeking help can have their questions proactively answered so that they can potentially resolve their own issues, saving time and taking pressure off of the support folks. Externally facing sites are the obvious “needs improvement” targets when it comes to the perceived need for personalization, but don’t discount what personalization can do to enhance enterprise-level search and  improve enterprise workplace search efficiency. 

Consider workplace search. Large organizations typically have a bunch of disparate silos: content repositories, domains, and platforms housing various functions, such as an HR portal, a tech-support ticket system, and a document database.  Personalizing workplace search could mean using features such as custom ranking, dynamic re-ranking, and query search suggestions to better meet employees’ information needs. You can also personalize search results based on what employees enter in the search bar, as well as optimize the results presented to certain worker groups, tailoring what’s returned to, for instance, a marketing communications team.  Personalized search is a customization of search engine results created by a filter that takes into account potentially relevant information such as the user’s history, location and preferences.

Google introduced personalized search in 2004, promoting it as a way to “understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.” Google uses a combination of information from user search history, bookmarks and personalized Google+ pages, among other services that are tied to user accounts. Sites you tend to visit more often appear higher on search engine results page (SERP). Although it has less information to go on, Google also attempts to provide personalized search to users that do not have a Google account and do not have search history enabled. Microsoft Bing is another personalized search provider. Like Google, Microsoft has many pages and services a user might already interact with. Those sites and services yield information for customization of both search and advertisement results.

Personalized search is more useful for some types of searches than others. It’s convenient, for example, for finding local services and finding information on topics that you’ve researched before. For other types of searches, however, such as researching a new topic, the customization tends to yield less valid and relevant responses than would be the case for an unfiltered search.

One of the concerns raised by critics of personalized search is that it limits the user’s view of the Web. That limitation is sometimes referred to as a filter bubble, which effectively restricts the user’s perspective and the information available to them. To disable personalized search in Google, add pws=0 at the end of a search URL. Another option is to click the gear icon in the top right and go to search settings > personal results > do not use personal results. Google also provides a bookmarlet: Turn off Google personalization. In Bing, click on the gear in the top right and go to: search history > turn off search history.

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.

Personalized Search

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.

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.