subject: Google Considers Pulling Out of China [print this page] At the start of December Google introduced mass market personalised search. Previously, Google had enabled personalised search only for those that had a Google account, and had enabled Google to access their search history.
Now, personalised search is opt-out for everyone that uses Google, meaning that you have to actively sign out from the system to not let Google access your search history. The process is also cookie based, which means that every time you use Google, the search engine plants a small piece of code on your PC; when you revisit the site, Google reads the cookie and has access to your previous search history. The cookie lasts 180 days, so it's not permanent.
This move toward cookie based opt out personalised search has raised privacy issues with some; they feel that Google is giving itself automatic access to your data, and is making yet another move towards world domination. However, Google has defended itself against these arguments, saying that users are free to opt out at any time.
Perhaps the biggest implications of mass personalisation is in SEO. Whereas peronsalisation was previously limited to users with a Google account, now it's on a mass scale. This makes the problems of most users having a different set of search results all the more real; the fact of mass personalisation makes SEO less important. How can you justify spending money on SEO when each person's rankings are different?
The answer here could be that there will always be a need for some SEO, it just may be reduced in effect slightly. After all, users are always going to need recommendations for things they have never searched for before.
My guess is that SEO is going to have to change and adapt quite cleverly if it is going to survive as an industry
