Aaron Goldman and Gord Hotchkiss of Search Insider have been having a bit of a back-and-forth about search personalization. Aaron summed up their respective positions last week:

Gord has been preaching that the biggest (and most important) opportunity for innovation in the search space is around personalization. I agree that we’ll see steady investment and advances in this area, but I’m less bullish than Gord on the prospects of personalized search to truly benefit the digital ecosystem.

These are two columnists that have a lot of respect for each other; Gord responded in true sportsman fashion yesterday:

It’s hard to find fault with his points. They’re all very real flaws in making personalization a credible evolution in search relevancy. Also, somewhere along the line, it appears that I’ve become the cheerleader for personalized search.

The problem for SEOs
In last week’s piece, Aaron went on to say that one situation where an individual doesn’t want to see results tailored to him or her is SEO practitioners who want to see what the general public sees atop the search rankings.

SEO practitioners, in fact, have been the most vocal segment to raise concerns about personalization. I suspect that this is primarily due to concern about revamping the business model and fear that they might be done out of a job; I would suggest that they will continue to play a vital role for online advertisers even though their tactics will have to be modified.

As with all professions, SEOs will be wiser to be continually looking forward to adapt the value they provide to the changing market. People who spend their energy trying to retain a status quo against the unstoppable force of market evolution will ultimately lose.

The new paradigm
The ones who do embrace what seems to be a pretty definite trend towards personalization will quickly realize the tremendous opportunity for online advertising. Forget about keywords! Serve up ads that are relevant to the user, not relevant to the words!

At a round table last month, Gord spoke about the necessary shift in focus for SEOs:

The thing about SEO in pre-personalization is that there are keywords and algorithms and everything revolves around keywords. But in personalization, it revolves around users: social pattern, search history, web history, and current tasks would revolve around this.

It’s very difficult for a marketer to look at an individual user. That becomes very granular. We’re going to look at buckets of behavior and work around themes. Themes that fall into common user themes are emphasized instead of keywords. Long tail optimization becomes very interesting. Optimizers will look at the long tail a little bit more where personalization may not be an impact right away. Personalization can really drive a much more presentation of universal search results. If you know more about the user, you’re more confident in providing different results to the user. Thus, understanding user behavior is vital. Knowing what people are looking for is critical. User-centric development will finally take hold. You would not believe how many sites are not user-centric. This will really push that.

(Note: I couldn’t tell from the post if this was an exact transcript or not; Gord, feel free to correct me if I got something wrong!)

His first sentence is what sums it up: the current SEO paradigm revolves around keywords; the personalized SEO paradigm revolves around users.

This is why the incremental shift towards personalization is inevitable: because our world is moving away from outputs and towards outcomes. At it most extreme, the Internet is an output. Our enhanced ability to connect as humans is an outcome.

VortexDNA is entirely people-focused, although the technology doesn’t rely on search history and so avoids many privacy and tracking concerns. The people in this company believe that the more you can truly connect with on a profound level, the more successful you will be. I hope that SEOs are excited by the opportunity that search engine personalization will provide to connect client content with the people who will be most moved by it.

Where do you sit on the bell curve? Are you an early adopter, in the early or late majority, or are you a laggard?

I like to think I’m in the early majority, although there are probably a lot of gurus out there who would place me firmly in the late one. I’m definitely not an early adopter—it just seems like a lot of effort, especially when it turns out that the first iteration wasn’t the best one and now you’ve got to start all over from scratch. But I suppose if you’re an early adopter, you’d want to start from scratch anyway, constantly. So you probably don’t care if the latest greatest thing you just invested gets quickly superseded. On the contrary, it gives you a reason to buy something new, hooray!

Right now, as I type these very words, I’m trying a new technology; I’m using Word 2007’s blogging function. It looks just like the document interface, with a few additional web-specific bells and whistles, and I assume it will publish the same as if I had logged into WordPress the way I usually do. Here’s my commitment to you, though; I will leave the post exactly as is when it gets published, even if it looks completely Picasso. Of course, I do have the option to publish it as a draft, but instead I’m going to live dangerously, throw caution to the winds, and let the chips fall where they may.

What does this have to do with Spock, you ask? Nothing. I’m just rambling, sorry. Now I’ll focus.

Alex Iskold reported on Spock for Read/Write Web this week, detailing the intricacies of their vertical search and their success at implementing semantic relationships:

The only kind of search result that you get from Spock is a list of people; and it interprets any query as if it is about people. So whether you search for democrats or ruby on rails or new york, the results will be lists of people associated with the query. In that sense, the algorithm is probably a flavor of the page rank or frequency analysis algorithm used by Google - but tailored to people.

I think this is a brilliant approach. The narrow focus allows Spock to really perfect the technique. One of the challenges with generalized semantics is the nearly infinite number of interpretations. Because the engine already knows the search is about people, all of the relationships and tagging and additional knowledge is confined to a highly specific set of possibilities. Keeping tight boundaries is conducive to success.

Iskold says tagging is the best part of Spock:

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spock is its usage of tags. Firstly, all frequent phrases that Spock extracts via its crawler become tags. In addition, users can also add tags. So Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging.

But I think the real master stroke is making their focus people. Really, they could have chosen anything: cars, bunny rabbits, or cargo containers. But by choosing people, they’re that much more likely to have the concept take off. Let’s face it, we love people. We love to talk about them, hear about them, read about them and gossip about them. We also love to talk about, hear about, read about and gossip about ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s human nature. So if a search engine like Spock allows us to tag ourselves and clarify our relationships to the world, we’re likely to enjoy it, and perhaps recommend it to others.

This is exactly the sort of activity that leads to viral spreading. Imagine if you discovered that you could type in “beach volleyball California” and your own name would come up. That would be pretty exciting—I’d certainly want to show somebody.

We say it all the time at VortexDNA. The Internet is about people. This isn’t The Matrix; without people, the Web is nothing.

Perhaps you don’t agree, or perhaps you think that more players on the Web need to remember that people are the purpose. Either way, I’d be delighted to get your opinion.

The latest plugin to become an overnight success is Joost de Valk’s nifty de-Google-personalization number. First brought to my attention by Search Engine Land, Joost’s code is capturing the imagination of the blogosphere, sweeping through the community like a sweeping thing.

Basically, the plugin stops Google from returning personalized search results, even if you’re logged into GMail or other Google services.

It’s easy to see why this plugin is becoming popular quickly. Its purpose is easy to grasp. Its message is powerful: take back control of your Google experience. And it’s free.

The thing is, I suspect many people are installing it because of the privacy fears that personalized search generates. And, as I commented on in an earlier post, personalization and privacy are not the same thing. Here’s a piece of it:

Saying that you don’t want personalization because of privacy risks while accepting that all of your movements are recorded anyway is akin to saying you don’t mind peeping Toms, as long as you don’t know they’re there.

Privacy is not a function of how personalized a service is. It is a function of the data that is collected and the steps that are taken to protect that data.

So I am on a quest to find out: why are people installing this plugin? Is it because you don’t like the results you get from personalized search? Or is it because you think your activity will be more private if your searches aren’t personalized?

Let’s hear from you. It’s important to make sure that, on the privacy issue, we aren’t a million blind people describing an elephant.

The astonishing complexity and incredibly advanced algorithms behind Google’s search capabilities were explored today by Saul Hansell in the New York Times. While most of the article focused on the many parameters used to determine which search results enter the coveted top ten, he also touched on Google’s push towards personalization:

Increasingly, Google is using signals that come from its history of what individual users have searched for in the past, in order to offer results that reflect each person’s interests. For example, a search for “dolphins” will return different results for a user who is a Miami football fan than for a user who is a marine biologist. This works only for users who sign into one of Google’s services, like Gmail.

(Google says it goes out of its way to prevent access to its growing store of individual user preferences and patterns. But the vast breadth and detail of such records is prompting lust among the nosey and fears among privacy advocates.)

The privacy concerns arise because of the nature of the information that Google is collecting: essentially, search history and demographics. Read every ESPN article on the Miami Dolphins? Google knows you’re a fan.

The thing is, Google has to collect and maintain all of the individual bits of information about you in order to provide you with personalized search results. For example, it isn’t enough to know you’re a Miami Dolphins fan if you’re searching for a furniture store. Google also has to know where you live.

If you then search for “beetle”, Google will add to its growing list of data about you whether you prefer cars or bugs. Each search adds a different clue to their quest to provide greater relevance.

Do you think this is appropriate? Do you really care if Google, or anyone for that matter, knows whether you prefer cars or bugs?

VortexDNA has the unique characteristic and firm policy of never tracking users’ histories—the VortexDNA profile is an aggregated genome representing the totality of your purpose and values. Because the technology tracks something totally different to the personal information tracked by Google, it’s possible that the combined techniques could result in even more relevant search results. Is this something that users want, though?

Do you prefer to keep your history private, or would you rather see a technology like MyWebDNA combine with history and demographics to produce the most relevant results?

What are your privacy concerns?

I’ve put up a few posts about the controversial semantic web or ‘Web 3.0′. Most people have a gut reaction that the concept is buzzword-heavy and lacking in practicality, or even a clear definition. Dr Riza C. Berkan summed up the issues today with intellectual rigor in a ReadWriteWeb post:

The two basic views of a semantic search are identified by the location of the semantic resources to be implanted. The first view is to embed the semantic resources in the Web pages themselves. It is called the “Semantic Web”. Why not compose Web pages in a structure that is semantics friendly?

…The “Semantic Web” approach has been around for a long time now. Unfortunately, it is based on an unrealistic assumption that every Web author will abide by the complex rules of semantics - not to mention the education it requires - and place content in the correct buckets of mysteriously unified standards. Another form of this approach may be to design Web factories that crank out refined Web pages once fed by ordinary Web pages. Of course if there is more than one factory, you have the standards issue again. In this day and age of fast content production, the Semantic Web seems to be more idealism than realism.

Dr Berkan goes on to discuss the pros of focusing efforts to understand the user at the search stage:

Without relying on statistics, long-tail queries can be analyzed by semantic algorithms on the fly, and bring search results with the accurate context… a semantic approach is very effective in handling dynamic content and can unleash its full power the second the content is born.

The argument, highly valid, is that it is easier to make one search engine intelligent than billions of web pages.

Dr Berkan’s company, hakia, offers a semantic search engine, as do Cognition Search and Lexxe. Powerset is working on theirs.

VortexDNA shares Dr Berkan’s view—in fact, we’re taking one step further away from the content. The idea behind MyWebDNA is not to create a new search engine, but a universal measure of relevance that can be overlaid onto any search engine.

Our tactics are different: the means of determining relevance can be through context, meaning, or, in our case, the purpose and values of the user. But our fundamental approach is the same: create the right lens, and the results will come into focus.

Nearly every one of my posts references another piece of journalism, but it’s truly a delight to point you in the direction of an articles written about VortexDNA and MyWebDNA. YahooXtra News commented on our validated search results with an article entitled ‘NZ start-up sees itself as the visa of the net’:

VortexDNA has developed a self-profiling system that will allow search engines like Google, or social sites like MySpace, to predict your search and hugely increase your “click rate” on links that come up as a result of an internet search.

I’m excited to see the media pick up on the story, which I had commented on in a previous post. The validation of the search results takes us from the watery realm of the hypothesis onto the firm ground of the business case, and it took a lot of people (not me—I just write about it!) a lot of brains, creativity and persistence to get us there.