Has Google Completely Personalized Search Results? A Crowd-sourced Experiment

For my presentation at Online Marketing Summit in February, I wanted to provide examples of how everyone now has a personalized search experience. I asked fellow members of a DC SEO group, colleagues, and friends (and at the bottom you’ll see screenshots from participants at my session) to send me screenshots of their results for “Chocolate” to see if personalized search results are truly rolled out to everyone.

I regularly counsel clients that they can’t Google themselves to see if they appear for key terms, but these screenshots were more impactful in telling that story. I’ve included name, age and location beneath each screenshot.

I was told by this individual that she’s a member of fancy.com which is where her images are pulling from. Note all of the NYC geo specific references.

Note the Arlington, VA specific recommendations on this one.

Note all of the UK references and the Chocolate Emporium Factory Tour.

It’s interesting to see how the above search results are personalized per location, and the Male from Bangladesh and the 50 year old man from Rockville both saw a “Chocolate Skateboards” listing. The results from Bangladesh also pulled .uk listings, where you didn’t see that in the US results.

It’s also interesting to note that the companies pulled into the top listings were pretty stable across all of the search results.

However, they are still all personalized to the user.

In case you’re still not convinced that all results are personalized, I also conducted a search usability test for my Online Marketing Summit presentation where participants in the test were asked to put in “car sharing” into Google search from their mobile phones. Participants were located in Washington, DC and New York City and you can see how different the listings are in the video here.

Update: A few more from Ketchum colleagues around the world:

Toronto, Canada:

Pittsburgh, PA

I find this next result interesting as the female employee is based out of Pittsburgh, but does quite a few searches to set up dinner reservations for client meetings in Chicago:

This listing is from Dubai, UAE:

And here are the results from Turkey, and the results when looking for “chocolate” in Turkish. Notice all of the Google maps and Google+ page results.

Rankings are dead

The search community has been abuzz with “rankings are dead”. I agree that they are.

I also think as search marketing people our job just got much harder if we want to ensure that our clients appear in front of their target audiences when their potential customers are searching. This UserTesting.com video was an experiment into solutions for how a company (like Hertz) might test to see if they appear when their target audience searches for their services when using a broader category term.

The results that I’ve collected above also cause me to question the usefulness of running “non-personalized” rankings to establish a benchmark. If all rankings are personalized (especially when users are logged into Google) how useful is a result that shows non-personalized results?

If you’re interested in learning more, I’ll be presenting about personalized search at the next DC/VA/MD Search Engine Marketing Meetup. Hope to see you there.