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Personalize me – Yahoo and its Goog to Know
You
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
April 27, 2005
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Some people like to personalize everything, mixing and matching from
an enormous variety of options to suit their unique tastes. Others are
not so fond of the concept of information personalization, fearing the
trend will remove their ability to access the same options everyone else
gets while trampling whatever sense of personal privacy they once held.
Regardless of how consumers personally feel about the concepts of data
mining and information personalization, it is now more of a modus operandi
than it is a trend in marketing. The major search engines are adopting
this method of operation with both Google and Yahoo announcing personalized
search features in the past two weeks and MSN presenting information on
one they are working on.
Early last week, Google introduced the beta version of My Search History.
Requiring user registration, the feature records and displays your Google
search history, making it accessible on any computer you might be working
on. My Search History uses a calendar format showing what you searched for,
where the searches took you, and the date and time of those searches. This
information is stored by Google and is easily viewed by clicking a link
added to the general search page at Google.com. Avni Shah from the My Search
History team explained Google’s motivation in a blog
posting last
Wednesday (April 20).
“How many times have you used Google to find an obscure funny website
or fun facts about "The Wizard of Oz," but then got distracted
by other web pages and tasks? I know - me too. Wouldn't it be great to find
them again, and for that matter review all your Google searches over time?
Which is exactly why we built My
Search History.
When you're signed in to your Google
Account , you can use My Search History
wherever you go. An additional bit of fun: try the handy calendar to check
the level of your Google activity on a given day, or see related searches
you've done over time. Look for the link in the upper right corner of your
Google web search home page and results pages.”
While the results gathered by My Search History do not affect general organic
results, marketers expect Google to use the information to better determine
which paid-ads to serve individual users. There is speculation that personalization
could eventually affect placement of organic listings displaying Google
AdSense however there is no actual evidence to suggest that will happen.
This week Yahoo responded with My Web, a slightly more powerful personal
search history-recording tool. My Web provides a storage space for everything
users choose to save while surfing Yahoo search results. An RSS feed will
allow users to blog and distribute content from saved sites sharing notes,
links and other information inputted by the user. My Web promotes a form
of social networking giving individual users a personalized space to evaluate
information saved in their searches. The space is built on the information
My Web records while they move through Yahoo results.
In a posting to the Ysearch
Blog, Senior Product Manager Kevin Akira Lee
wrote, “Today, we launched a ‘My Web’, a new personal
search engine fully integrated with Yahoo! Search. My Web is based on a
very simple principle - a search engine should enable you to define and
use the information that’s important to you. Specifically, My Web
enables you to find the information relevant to you, save it, share it,
add your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it’s three
days or three months later.
The idea is a simple one – we provide a “Save” button
on our search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox),
and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the Web. When
you hit the “Save” button, My Web grabs that page and makes
a cached copy which is fully searchable. Anytime you need that page, all
you need to do is search My Web. You can publish your My Web links via RSS
and, of course, there’s an API for My Web published on YSDN.”
My Web opens more doors for search marketers and advertisers. Yahoo Search
Marketing is working to integrate their various features such as Yahoo360,
Instant Messenger, YahooMail, etc, with their paid-ad delivery network innovating
on the model outlined by Google’s integration of AdWords and Gmail.
By making it easier for search marketers to work with their system, Yahoo
is betting they can motivate ad-buyers and search marketers to migrate away
from Google.
Both Google and Yahoo are responding to a larger long-term threat posed
by MSN’s long-pending release of their all-encompassing Longhorn operating
system. First scheduled for release in mid 2004, Microsoft now sees December
2006 as a likely release date. Longhorn was meant to be the end-all-be-all
when it came to merging search tools into the operating system. Back in
2003 when Microsoft started hyping it, Longhorn was going to incorporate
a desktop search feature, blog creation features, a personalization tool
called Stuff I’ve Seen, a expandable toolbar, and dozens of other
features that would give the new operating system extra clout in the completive
world of search. Everybody knows that MSN has the dice loaded with their
control of the vast majority of operating systems used on the Internet.
While Microsoft’s absolute dominance might be cracking with open source
products taking huge shares of what was once theirs, the software giant
has been working triple time to enter and dominate the search market.
Recently, MSN's research specialist Susan Dumais released a presentation
showing that Microsoft’s vision of search is as heavily influenced
by its competitors as theirs are by Microsoft. In her presentation, “Personal
Information Management, Helping the Finders Become the Keepers” Ms.
Dumas notes that search is about finding previously retrieved information
as much as it is about finding new information. With a control over the
operating system and allowance from its users, Microsoft will be able to
scan your hard drive to find stuff you saw and saved that are in any way
relevant to your search query. Their recent experiments with document clustering
might point to the direction these personalized results will be presented.
Over the past two years, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other search firms
have rolled out variations on products and features thought to be incorporated
in Longhorn. They have also developed other products, innovating on other
ideas and concepts in the realm of information retrieval and distribution.
The rapidity of change in the information environment, along with the ironic
tendency of other firms to innovate on Microsoft’s stated intentions
are the likely reasons Longhorn keeps getting pushed back quarter after
quarter. Even so, Longhorn is still said to be coming and Google, Yahoo
and the rest have only so many months to make hay while the sun is definitely
going to shine.
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