Archive: March, 2007

Last Friday, a group of 10 met in the Metamend boardroom for the first of what we hope will be a regular series of brain-jams. Staff from Metamend and Enquisite gathered to share our thoughts about Google’s introduction of personalized search. It was a fun session that appears to have generated a lot of discussion in the offices of both companies.

The afternoon opened with a 34 slide Powerpoint presentation designed to offer a background on what personalization is, how personalized data is collected and from which areas, and what Google might be doing with that data to create personalized result sets. Towards the end, it drops a bombshell quote Gord Hotchkiss drew from Marissa Mayer about the development of personalized pagerank values for individual users. That’s when things got interesting…

This was our first session as a growing team but after my admittedly lame PPT was complete the room buzzed with discussion and ideas including a cool behavioural curve outlined by Enquisite statisticians, Raphael.

The items on where Google is drawing info from are well documented. There is one piece of information about personalization that sort of flew under the radar of most analysts though. A Gord Hotchkiss interview with Marissa Mayer from last month contains some of the most interesting snippets about how Google developed their personalization plans. Marissa Mayer is the head of product development at Google.