Personalization, User Data & Search
Dave Davies, CEO Beanstalk “A Look at Google’s Patents”
User behavior -If someone goes to Google, clicks your result, sees your site and then goes right back to Google, “you’re screwed,” it’s a vote of ‘no confidence’ for that keyword(s).
“Personal PageRanlk” Not valuing PageRank for your site, but assessing YOU.
Group data - If Charles likes X and has the same characteristics as Nitin, Nitin will probably like X, too.
Jonathan Mendez, CSO (Chief Strategy Officer), OTTO Digital
(He is parsing a really long URL, each little section can be “deciphered” if you know the code!)
[Note to self: He apologizes for going way too fast (I’ve stopped taking notes - and offers to talk to people afterwards. Hmmm, wouldn’t it be better to cover less and talk slower now?]
Richard Zwicky, CEO Enquisite
With Universal Search, the results page is getting so crowded that there are fewer organic search results “above the fold,” so it is “damned hard to rank above the fold anymore.” So how do you do it? Hire a very, very good SEO!
85% of traffic comes from the organic (left side) free results, and 90% are from page 1, so it’s proably worth the effort (read: co$t)
Keyword selection is getting harder with different cities, different regional “slang” or words for the same thing, different engines (GYM), and so on - and that’s just in the U.S.
Aaron D’Souza, Google
(This room is packed!)
Yes, Google knows where you are, but if two people sitting next to each other search for ‘cricket’ and one like sports and one likes bugs…[I would imagine their click-streams would solve that issue.]
“It’s not How Many people you get your link in front of! It’s Who you get your link in front of.” 25 good users are better than 1,000 irrelevant ones.
And remember, you can turn Personalization off, or (if not now, soon) Edit It!
Bill Barnes EVP Enquiro Search Solutions
Used volunteers, “focus groups,” eye tracking / heat map studies, click behavior, etc. Excellent!
Bonus fun fact: Don’t kill yourself to rank your site #1 or #2 in Google, #3 - #5 are more profitable (pr-Universal?) So let Wikipedia be first…to get such precision, I would think that you would certainly need a very, very good SEO.
With personalized searches, there is more scanning of the results - on both the free and paid ad sides.
James Colburn, Microsoft
If you buy ads (PPC), you should be thinking about a) Geography b) Day of the Week, and c) Time of Day. If you’re a barber in Chicago open only M-R 10 -6, then maybe you would only want your ad to show up to match those parameters.
But now……don’t just match the Business information, search the Person’s (User’s) information! E.g. I want my ad to only show when a male aged 35 - 55 with moderate income is searching.
I would stop and think about that.
Q: What if I search for ‘Diabetes’ because Richard has it, not me?
A: Doesn’t matter. “I” am still interested in those results, even though I don’t have diabetes.
Bottom line: The major search engines know an amazing amount of cross-referenced information about every personalized search. In other words, they are smart and getting smarter; they are “learning” more about individual people every day - maybe you!.
End of session.
