Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo, gives his perspective on all the hype about personalized search. Of course he thinks clustered search is the wave of the future, that's what he does. His main beef with personalized search is that it people are dynamic and not always looking for the same type of information, so it is difficult to predict a user's intent based on web pages viewed. I agree that there are loads of problems that will arise with personalized search, but I think he underestimates the value of user profiles like Yahoo has been building on their customers, enabling them to track user preferences, pageviews, purchases, etc, over a very long period of time. Sure, there will be some flaws in the system, and it will never be 100% perfect, but I can definitely see personalized search providing significant value to the user. Look at how effective amazon is with their personalization. They don't always recommend books that I actually care about, but 90% of the time they are spot on. It's that 90% of correct assumptions that provide value to the end user.

Raul goes on to say that the best approach is to let each individual personalize their own experience by choosing from results that are clustered by theme, in folders or some similar interface...hmm, sounds a lot like Vivisimo.

I think the best approach to personalized search is probably a combination of both automated personalization and clustered results to let people find the right search results when the automated process screws up (which will inevitably happen at least some of the time).