The best SEO company should always understand the value of personalized search in creating search engine optimization campaigns. While this is certainly beneficial for search engine optimization companies and eCommerce sites, how exactly do users view personalized search?
Google dramatically increased the rate of personalization when it comes to search results when it launched the Search Plus Your World earlier this year. Bing also offered users more personalized search results when it partnered up with Facebook from late last year. While both major search engines promise (and guarantee) better and more helpful search engine results, it’s not exactly the way consumers see it.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a project of the PewResearch Center, nearly 65% or two-thirds of Google and Bing users don’t really care about personalized search. In fact, they see it as a “bad thing”, considering it an invasion of privacy. No one really wants others to know about their search histories, right?
From January 20 to February 19, 2012, approximately 2,000 adults in the US were surveyed about search engines and how they use it. Questions focused on search engine use, such as how users would feel about search engines storing and keeping track of the information searched by users for future results.
SearchEngineLand.com analyzed the results and according to the survey, 65% of the respondents indicated that it is a “bad thing” only because the results will be limited, as compared to the other 29% who said that it is a “good thing” because of the relevance of the results to the users. Based on the demographics, older people tend to view personalized search as in a bad light, just the same way as the users in the higher income bracket. While users do appreciate the improvements in search engine results, indicating that they do find results accurate, not to mention getting better over time, they still believe that personalized search is an invasion of privacy.
In terms of the dominance of search engines, Google is still the clear winner. 83% of the respondents preferred Google, with Yahoo! taking up only 6% of the share and the rest are other less-favorite search engines.