John Battelle points out that Google is ramping up to collect personalized search profiles of searchers and is already doing so, in some cases - according to Greg Linden .

"I would guess it works by determining subject interests (e.g. sports, computers) and biasing all search results toward those categories. That would be similar to the old personalized search in Google Labs (which was based on Kaltix technology) where you had to explicitly specify that profile, but now the profile is generated implicitly using your search history."

What makes such a massive undertaking possible is inexpensive distributed storage that can categorize, update, store, retrieve and re-rank search results in real time (or else this personalized profiles would not be that useful); this system is called BigTable.

"Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable."

As Greg Linden points out, aka John Battelle, the collection of personalized profiles may be also invasion of your privacy:

"….. worries this approach will not work so well for the task at hand, and I agree with him, but that’s not my topic for this post. What I want to point out is simply this: what rights do you, I, or anyone else have to edit, delete, or own these profiles?

Anyone from Google care to answer that one?"

 

Yes, I’ll answer.

It may be an invasion of privacy if carried to as far as it could go- but I don’t think Google is the kind of company to carry it that far.   There are issues here that have not fully been explored and maybe that needs to happen before or during the development of the technology to personalize search results.

It’s been known that standard SEO goes down the tubes if you personalize everyone’s search result…what do you optimize for then?  You have to optimize your content for the category that it’s in - so when Google gets to the point where it can personalize everyone’s search results on the fly (if that ever really happens) your category optimized content comes to the top).  It’s the same game, just new variables to take care of…

Also, the audience becomes a lot more important - as you’ll be optimizing for an audience - not so much for the search engine.

I think John Battelle brings up an important point - right now Google owns the profiles and while you don’t have to use personalized search - Google can still collect data.  I’d like to see Google clean the data, de-personalize it, and then sell it as Market Intelligence.  I know they dabble with that from time to time - but I’d like to see them go all the way….but only with data that can not be tied back to individuals.