What is Google's Personalized Search?

Back in February Google rolled out it's new Personalized Search Results. What this actually means is your search history is now recorded every time you are logged into your Google Account. If you use Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Groups, or Alerts, you will automatically be shown search results tailored to your past search history. By default Google will be adding Personalized Search functions to all new accounts.

For example, if you are searching for 'bass fishing' and have searched for 'South Carolina' before, the first few search results will show you 'bass fishing in South Carolina'. This helps in reducing the number of search results and is most likely to provide you the most relevant searches in the shortest possible time.

You can see non-personalized results by logging out of your Google account or you can turn Google's personalized web search results off by adding &pws=0 to the URL of your search query.

So how does this effect Search Engine Optimization? As SEO's we strive to create quality content for a good user experience so our optimization methods will fit right into Google Personalized Search Results. There is a wonderful article on Search Engine Land by Nick Wilson that talks about some SEO methods we are going to need to start thinking about when it comes to optimizing for personlaized searches, read the article:

Optimization Practices for Google Personalized Results