Google will now attempt to personalize searches for authenticated users.
If you’re logged into gmail, adwords, or some other Google product, Google will track your searches and try to see what your interests are, and then serve results based on that.
This is undoubtedly going to raise the importance of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) since SEO-related efforts will grow increasingly harder to attract a mass audience.
At least with PPC, you’ll be able to have your ad run for everyone (for now). Ultimately, that too would logically change. Microsoft has demographic filter in its adCenter as of today, and Google will probably add this feature to Adwords soon as well – based on the demographic of authenticated users.
Sources that have spoken to Google engineers last August confirmed that this was under an opt in program, which meant you had to go to your account page and navigate to this feature and activate it.
Now that has changed to an opt out program. If you are authenticated at a Google site, it will filter your results based on your previous searches (unless you change your settings, of course).
The example they gave our sources was that a hypothetical person looking to buy a car, specifically a Jaguar – is unlikely to be interested in information on the animal. Google would use your search history in this case to filter out those results (assuming you had searched for other car manufacturers).
Currently 4 of the top 10 search results have nothing to do with the car. Presumably at the bottom they will run a link stating: “Do you mean Jaguar (animal)?” or something similar.
At the time of this writing, Gmail has only about a 5% of the web email market share, so the impact of such a change is not so significant, but eventually I see Google rolling this program out universally based on a perpharps a cookie?