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.

- Working on personalization for four years – goes back to Kaltix acquisition (Sept 30, 2003)

- “Kaltix Corp. was formed in June 2003 and focuses on developing personalized and context-sensitive search technologies that make it faster and easier for people to find information on the web.”
From Google Press Release, Sept 2003

- “And so, what they were doing, was that they had figured out a way to sort by host and as a result of sorting by host, be able to compute PageRank in a much more computationally efficient way to make it feasible to compute a PageRank per user, or as a vector of values that are different from the base PageRank.”

So, each user is expected to have a personalized page-rank vector. Hmmm….

Here are a few notes about personalization SEO from the slides: (note the cheezy emphasis on seo)

Perseonalization (old skool)

Accessibility more important than ever

Site needs to be visitor focused.

Visitor tracking analytics important tool to gauge accessability

Usability more important than ever

Meeting basic usability standards is not only a webmaster best practice, it is actually the law.

Use of XML sitemap… more important than ever.

Feed information to the search engines.

Assume use of DIY tools like Google Co-op will have effect on personalized results

Great document titles
always important for SEO but,

Personalization might have a popularity contest aspect.

Killer descriptions
always extremely important

Geo-modifiers (address, zip/postal, gps)

Personalization starts at home. Local, regional, national factors should be considered

Shopping for a guitar in Victoria BC, not Victoria TX

Every client site has a market, be it local regional or national. Add geomodifiers to text, address and contact information that best conforms to that market. Give Google and site users as much information as possible.

Bookmark me bug (goto GoogleBoomkarks)

Add a Google Bookmarks bug to documents.

Perseonalization (New Skool)

Social Media Optimization

Spreading the word about client sites and products is important. Using social media to prompt searches under client favourable keywords isn’t difficult.

Using social media to build traffic patterns from client-relevant user communities.

Use social media to promote bookmarking of client documents

Each client should be encouraged (where relevant) to establish a Flickr account. (yeah, I know this is supposed to be about Google but really, it’s about the traffic.)

Blogs and comments

Blogging good

Clients should be encouraged to leave professional (relevant and helpful) comments in blogs similar to theirs in the hopes of drawing traffic.

MyBlogLog (see above) and other blog enhancements

RSS feeds

Give site visitors information anyway they want to receive it. RSS is important.

Audio files (podcasts)

use embedded audio files and make available for download

put Google Bookmarks bug on page w/downloads

tagging

Video (lots of question marks here but it’s advancement is a no-brainer)
similar to audio

professional quality content

tagging