Google have extended further into personalized search results for those with ‘Search History’ turned on in their Google Account. Its likely to result in all sorts of conjecture which I’d like to sidestep and instead spend a few moments pondering out aloud.

Could personalized search – whether this implementation by Google or a future one (by any provider) help reduce spam results by affecting the potency of SERPs? Imagine a time where everyone’s results are personalized by numerous factors, whether by search history, demographic, geographic, psychographic or any-other-graphic. The concept of SERPs disolves as the results are further segmented into a myriad of micro-niches.

Spammers incentive (and indeed, maybe even legitmate SEO implementers) to occupy the top SERPs must be diminished in line with the diminished reward? Could the effort required to achieve positions across the almost infinite permutations of SERPs (the results for phrases multiplied by all possible personalizations) tip the effort required to achieve a return to un-economic level?

You could argue that the number of permutations could be quite low. Whilst only some keywords will have differing meaning and contexts, most could have a context which may yield a different result for almost any user. This might not be practical, however, as one wonders what logic or intelligence could be used to determine which factors to apply to which keywords. When to apply geographic information, say for searches relating to buying a car versus when not to, in the case of me searching for a solution to a javascript issue I was working on.

Whatever happens, this is an interesting area of development – for ideas covered here as well as the many concerns currently being raised in the blogosphere.

Danny Sullivan does an excellent write-up on this latest release from Google so I suggest heading there for more details.

Stumble it!