But hey, if you guys like it so much, more power to everyone.

Thanks for saving me SEFL, this post was all over the place. :)

My concern is if any search engine attempts to adjust the non-personalized algorithm based on aggregate collection of data among personalized searches and subsequent clickthroughs. In other words, if I click on a result from my personalized search or I add it as a site I want to see (or not see), does that data end up in the non-personalized algo as well?

I hope this isn’t the case. If it is, then there will be a period where SESMO (Search Engine/Social Media Optimization) will get totally out of hand and silly.

“Bookmark my site in Google and I’ll bookmark yours.”
“You can manipulate the results by signing up for 100 Hotmail accounts and creating personalized searches from proxy servers.”
“Bookmark and link exchange sought, PR5 site, quality content, your site must have a PR5 or higher.”

As long as the data is kept separate, then it’s not going to affect me in the slightest. It’s the aggregate that scares me.

I could only see a couple of ways it can happen.

1) Individual search patterns over time
2) Click thru data

The way I see it is if those 2 elements are combined to provide a “personal” set of results that you would be most likely to visit, then that could bias the results and make a persons search habits vetical.

While in many cases this can be good, in other cases I see it as making it too narrow and could lead to leaving more relevance out of the data.

As an SEO I am trying to embrace and prepare for personalized search as it seems unavoidable, but as a savvy searcher I am somewhat unhappy that my searching is going to be based on “me” factors and those factors may be less relevant, and in turn narrowing my scope of knowledge in some cases.

Personalization is coming, that is a fact so we must adapt. This post was just to throw a few ideas out there, thanks for sharing your views.

That’s like one hand washing the other, aka “compensation.” Or saying you wanna do good deeds because you want to go to heaven, not because its the right thing to do. Not too distant from paying for links, since the expectation is still there that by linking, you will get something in return somewhere down the road. That’s a lousy reason to link out if you ask me.

Anyhow, someone on a site that has nothing to do with my product made a single page that describes what it is myself and others sell and also put links at the bottom of the page to all of us. That one single page ranks better in search engines than our entire sites dedicated to this product.

You see it was this act of “charity” that brought me out of the depths of the index that in turn rewarded this person for making his page. Kind of hard to explain when you got a kid pulling at your leg all day. :)

There is good stuff out there that can be pulled into the mix and it does benefit yes you, the other person and the future of search. If you could design an algorithm to observe people who have the correct behavior in archiving information they could make search more relevant if you follow this idea. That is data retrieval via personalization…

The focus should be on people who read your blog, not yourself or people you link to.

I don’t recommend thinking of linking out as a form of establishing your identity or as a form of charity. I would think of it as improving user experience by driving home a point, providing additional points of reference, or one-click access to something you’re talking about.

For example, while you might help some of your readers by occasionally disabling nofollow on blog comments, the concept is misdirected, because the main purpose of a blog IMO is to convey ideas and provide an area for discourse, not to help yourself or other bloggers generate “organic” links.