At SMX East, there was a talk on The Current State of Personalized Search. The panel consisted of Jack Menzel from Google and Stefan Weitz from Bing. Danny Sullivan was the moderator.
A few interesting thoughts came out of this:
1. There is no longer anything called Personalized Search (said Stefan Weitz). All search is personal. Its just Search. The old ways of search are gone and wont exist anymore. This is what search has become.
2. The big question for everyone of whether or not SEO is dead. Is it? Jack jumped in here and said no. And he added that not only was it not dead, all this personalization should be helping SEO’s and making our lives easier. And he is right. Before this personalization, if you wanted to rank, you needed to beat EVERYONE for those terms. But now, we no longer need to be globally relevant for something that is not globally relevant. You only need to be relevant for people that are doing the search.
There are some drawback, for instance, it will be harder to track and measure, and there is also going to be instances where the wrong information might be served up even because my network found it useful. But that’s for another post. From a performance standpoint, it should be helping us.