Search Engines Get Personal
Leading sites explore how to draw on user interests and common queries to serve up custom findings.
Dennis O'Reilly, PC World
SAN JOSE -- The next time you enter "Thai restaurants" in a search engine's text box, you might find more than just ten blue links. Don't be surprised to be served reviews of establishments in your vicinity, and maybe even a link to make a reservation.
Several of these search "shortcuts" under development by Google, AOL Search, and other Web search engines are being described at this week's Search Engine Strategies conference here. The search sites' goal is to put the sought information one click closer by preprogramming responses to common searches. So a restaurant query may be tied to a user's location to quickly produce addresses, telephone numbers, and other information about nearby places. Eventually, the results could be influenced by your personal preferences, or by those of a group of like-minded people.
Tailoring the Tools
One such project in Google's Lab is called Google Personalized. It invites users to create a profile by selecting categories of interest that range from "bluegrass music" to "mobile computing" to "skateboarding" to "women's health." Then you choose the degree of personalization you want, via a slide bar at the top of the screen. At the lowest setting, the results appear the same as you'd get with the standard Google engine (minus the sponsored links on the right). Results that appear as a result of your profile are marked with a colored ball icon.
AOL Search has already programmed 1.5 million custom search pages, according to Andrew Cohen, AOL director of search programming, who participated in a conference session called "Search Detours: Beyond Top 10." Cohen described AOL Search's "invisible tabs" as "tools that distinguish search results automatically." AOL intends to let searchers "immediately arrive at their destination," according to Cohen. "They deliver the payoff rather than a link to the payoff," he said, giving a movie showtime as an example.
One of the first Web search services to try to deliver answers as well as links is Ask Jeeves. Its Smart Search, which debuted last year, integrates telephone directories, news and weather, and other content from third parties with your search results.
"Users expect you to read their minds," said Daniel Read, director of U.S. sites for the company. Read told the same conference session that Ask.com, owned by Jeeves, has 150 Smart Search features.
Getting Personal? Not Yet
Even with these new search services, search engine analysts say true personalization of search results won't arrive for some time.
"I don't think in a year you're going to see personalization in search," says Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com and a conference moderator.
"In six months to a year you'll see many more [personalization] options," Sullivan told the "Personalizing Search" conference session. Still, he says even Google's beta test product "is not full-blown personalization."
Another issue is whether searchers will take the time to create a personal search profile, and whether they'll trust the search engines with their private information.
"The key is relevance," says Jan Pedersen, chief scientist for Yahoo Search and Marketplace. "People will only use personalized search if it improves the relevance of their search results."
Help From Your Friends
If you think your searching might improve by making it a group effort, you may be interested in the convergence of search and social networking offered by Eurekster, a year-old search site.
The search engine claims to learn from your search habits, so if you follow a link and spend more than a minute on the page, that link will be closer to the top the next time you search that term. And if you get your friends to join one of the service's "SearchGroups," the links they like will appear higher in your results when you search on the same term.
Eurekster recently began creating Information Nations focused on specific topics that let participants control the information the engine searches. Among the most popular at present cover rugby, fishing, and (not surprisingly) search.
