Yesterday I was reacting to a SearchEngineLand post about Google's Google's Personalized Results changing the whole search landscape.  When I looked at the changes, they seemed too subtle to really get all that worked up over. 

But today, MarketingVox comments  on Personalized Search changes - saying that Google's Personalized Search Shifts SEM Landscape.  But does it? 

In fact, it's time to talk about an uncomfortable reality - that SEM and SEO are not relevant to every-one's business model, at least, not in the commonly accepted sense.  First, before I get into that - here's an excerpt from the MarketingVox post:

 "….Google's algorithm now takes into account searchers' click history as well as their Personalized Homepage when it returns search results. The changes are designed to offer results that are more useful to the searcher, with each new user behavior becoming a new factor in future searches.

For search engine marketers that means the days of trying to divine that one secret formula for scoring high among search results are now gone. Now there are an unlimited amount of variations in search results even for a single search term, because search results in part depend on the click history of each user.

Also being factored into returning search results are the types of sites in users' Google Bookmarks, a social tagging tool analogous to del.icio.us. SEL speculates that Google Reader feed subscriptions or feed click history are not being used for Personalized Search, but the RSS aggregator could provide yet another data set for Personalized Search."

I found the differences almost, not worth bothering about, so far.  What's a lot worse is that AdWords and AdSence (and by extension, Yahoo's PPC platform/s) is the Lazy person's marketing.  Sure, why do anything to make your products/services work when you can just pay Google and Yahoo to send you traffic?

For certain of my customers, PPC is not longer effective - period.  Most of the architects I know and have worked with were actually spending more on PPC then they were getting pack in the sales of house plans, often at a factor of 3:1.

Recently, I did a deep dive in the customer base of a client and found it was mostly DIRECT (no search engine referral) from local Real Estate agencies or Developers.   Search probably had almost nothing to do with acquisition of these clients - it was all about the BRAND.

Before we worry about Personalized Search …. maybe we ought to look first to see we even have the right advertising and marketing vehicle, because PPC does not really suit many of the businesses that are using it (because they can't get enough traffic any other way).

In the case of my client, advertising and contacting professional associations would probably yield a lot better results, and perhaps, vertical search advertising in building and construction directories, or even Pet and Dating sites, might yield better results.

But if Search, all around becomes more personalized, and if marketers can control (as they can begin to do with AdCenter) to whom their ads are shown) maybe PPC will make more sense for businesses that, I feel, should not use PPC now (since it's a waste of their money).

And when we talk about Organic Search - let's face it - people who are searching are usually in the "research" phase of the buying cycle.  I know of a site that has great Organic Listings for "house plans" by they hardly increased their sales from last year.  Clearly, the site owners did not do a good enough job of answering the searchers' research questions.

Personalized search actually ought to be the optimizers friend - provided a business can even befit from search, at all - and that's a whole other ball of wax that not too many people really want to look at.