The Search Engine Persona
April 25th, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy
The Wall St. Journal reports today on a number of new search technologies that promise to customize your search activity based on previous activity. If, for example, you have searched on Burgundy the place more often than Burgundy the wine, Google would return search results more travel-focused than oenophile-focused. Search personalization will soon extend to the ads you see as well. Sites to check out in this vein include collarity.com, which offers its own ‘relevance engine’ with a setting slider bar (purportedly, since it doesn’t appear on my browser) as well as third-party tools for sale, and Prefound.com, a profile-based search site that looked promising (but sent me an antispam failure message that will surely have our IT guy’s dander up).
On the whole, my dander is up a bit on this topic, too. I have to applaud Yahoo, because they give search history-based results the thumbs-down, at least for now. To quote their VP of Web Search, “If you get it right, people really like it. If you get it wrong, they dislike it even more.”
My take: until these technologies are perfected, and maybe even despite the fact that they soon will be, part of the fun of being online, at the helm of your favorite search engine, is the potential surprise of what will appear: a solution you may not have considered, a path you hadn’t taken before, something off the bullseye but on the same topical dartboard where you were pursuing some kind of inquiry. A few years ago I co-wrote a thought piece for a pharma client on the power of searching broadly, and how blinders-on, narrow therapeutic niche mentalities in big pharma were defeating discoveries that came from across therapeutic areas. To me, the same principle applies to search. And whatever happened to thinking about your search string for a few seconds before tapping it in?
If you’re still with me, check out Eurekster, which offers search engines that can be self-customized and placed on any Web site. These search engines, called Swickis, collect and display information based on your stated interests. Reminds me of a conversation I once had with a neurosurgeon. “I’m a superspecialist,” he said. “Superspecialists know more and more about less and less until we end up knowing everything there is to know about nothing at all!”
