Google

Google has a beta personalized search engine at: http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html that is pretty interesting to test. You're told to click on Health, then General Health checkbox and search for "stanford." When searching for word "bob" instead of "stanford" at Minimum Personalize setting first three results are "Bob Builder," "Bob Marley" and "Bob Dylan". The rest of this page has no health related information on it as well. But, when slider is pulled to Maximum Personalize, "Dr. Bob" has first two positions followed other results mentioned above. Its obvious Google has a ways to go in developing this.

Personal Privacy

If personalized search is to succeed, then personal privacy issues need to be addressed and concerns held to a minimum. Will personalized search involve searching your hard drive to see what your interests are? Will your interests be stored in a cookie on your computer? What happens when multiple users share a computer - will someone else get hit with all sorts of Preparation H advertisements because of hemorrhoid treatment searches you wanted to keep private? And will children be affected by adult personalized searches?

These are all questions that SE's need to address so that people do not feel that their privacy is being violated or put at risk. The more control and choice user has over personalized search more likely it has in succeeding for search engines.

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The ? technique for tracking traffic is even recommended by Pay-Per-Click engines which give instructions to advertisers using technique to track clickthroughs from PPC ads. Appending "?overture-keyword" to end of PPC destination URL's makes that visior who clicked your ads show up in your log files and allows you to know phrase that delivered that visitor and that visitor originated from Overture. SEO's have always used # and ? to advantage in an incremental fashion to optimize client sites. The jump links to named anchors is routinely used by SEO's by placing keywords in #named-anchor links.

This works particularly well on long FAQ pages and on glossary of terms pages. Instead of doing what most do and using <.ahref="#FAQ1" rel="nofollow"> Keyword Phrase<./a> instead we use < a href="#keyword-phrase" rel="nofollow"> Keyword-Phrase< /a>. Of course you'll need to use it again in anchor tag at < a name="keyword-phrase">< /a> Again, just an incremental tidbit to increase use of keyword phrase by a slight margin THROUGHOUT site in that same incremental fashion, without being excessive. The same is done with image filenames < img src="keyword.gif"> second level directory names /keyword-phrase/keyword.html, page filenames, and embedding links in visble page text keyword phrases < a href="keyword-phrase.html" rel="nofollow"> Keyword Phrase < /a> rather than worthless < a href="wordfrag4.htm" rel="nofollow"> Click Here< /a>

Every once in a while someone re-discovers these incrementally valuable techniques and attempts to abuse them a la "Google Bombing" (as discussed in WebProWorld forum) and they get abused obscenely by overly agressive folks that risk being banned in order to gain short term advantage for their own sites.

This leads search engines to downgrade or penalize those who abuse techniques. SEO is not made up of a single technique used to compulsive levels. Wholistic SEO is using many techniques moderately for incremental gains. When you get obsessive about any one technique it leads to trouble.

Stay out of trouble – please!