Google has been steadily been building a suite of products tied into a single Google identity – think Gmail, Adsense, Google Video, Groups etc.. Now Google is taking further advantage of those user accounts (as well as trying to create a few more) by adding more personalisation to searches.
Now when you are signed into your Google Account, Google is offering a combination of personalised search recommendations and the personalised homepage, to bring, duh, a more ‘personalised’ search experience.
The goal is that it learns from your search history and preferences to bring you more relevant search results. So, when searching for ‘Saints’ it will focus on my footballing interests rather than my religious ones.
Those searchers that may have more ‘private’ search queries can sign out of their account, but for the rest of us it should result in a more satisfactory search experience, as it learns more about our personal preferences.
More loyalty to the Googleverse and better search results – they hope it will be a winning strategy.
P.S. Sorry for the rush of Google-related posts, but they have been doing some interesting things of late (plus I’ve re-subscribed to their blog).
mike
Wonder if this works with Google custom search – http://www.google.com/coop/cse/overview – now that would be personalized search.
Think you might be able to import this into your startpage, but as I use Netvibes, I wouldn’t know…
Chris
You certainly can, Mike. There’s an ‘Add to Google’ button when you create a custom search engine which adds it to your start page.