Personalised search reorders the SERP based on you past searches, considering what you have previously looked at and searched for in an attempt to bring more relevant results to the user. Google stores a history of everything you search for and click on so that they can feed this data back into their algorithm and give you a set of results that are personalised to you.
Google used cookies to do this, so if you using Google as an anonymous (sighed out) user each set of personalised results will differ from PC to PC as well as browser to browser.
For example we might search regularly in Google to see where seospecialistbirmingham.co.uk is positioned for the term SEO Specialist, what each user see for this search can potentially be different to each user.
Google have also incorporated a bundle of other functions in to this feature, these include:
Bookmark - A feature that lets the user mark any page in the search results that they like and may wish to find again. This also allows for search results to be labelled and have annotations associated with them.
Block Site – This lets a user completely block an entire domain from appearing in that users search results, either for a single search or for all future searches. This type of personalisation can be removed or paused at any point.
On the surface this service seams to offer a more relevant set of search data, however it does also result in some negative outcomes. Having search results that differ on each terminal will result in a loss of continuity across the web which could well be frustrating for web users. This will also mean that people are less likely to see different websites other that ones they already know, this includes new websites. Perhaps more importantly web results will become less diverse which could result in users not getting a balanced spread of information and only seeing result that support their already established points of view.
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