Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

PERSONALIZATION

Search engines customize results based on individual searcher behavior. They continue to ramp up their efforts over time to understand not only searcher intent in aggregate but also intent for specific searchers.

Search engines need to provide relevant results to searchers (so that they’ll keep coming back to that search engine and be an audience for its advertising); and because searchers provide few clues about what they’re really looking for, we’ve seen that search engines use aggregate knowledge to discern meaning. But searchers are individuals, not the sum of their aggregated searches, so extrapolating the intent of one search based on the actions of all the searches that came before can rarely provide results as relevant as those tailored to the individual searcher.

Over the years, search engines have tried various customization options to enable searchers to take an active role in improving their results—everything from sliders to adjust ranking factors, filtering specific types of files, date ranges, and type of content.

But even though all of these could indeed improve results, for the most part, searchers have overwhelmingly ignored them. One reason for this goes back, again, to the idea of bounded rationality.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen describes this tendency as follows:

The basic information foraging theory, which is, I think, the one theory that basically explains why the Web is the way it is, says that people want to expend minimal effort to gain ...