Google is now showing "search customization" messages to inform searchers when their search results have been modified from "normal" due to a searcher’s geographic location, previous query or web surfing and search history.
4 Comments
4 Comments
Comments
That’s awesome that they’re trying to be more transparent. Thanks for this info!
"Are results being skewed in some cases toward non-commercial sites? If so, could the searcher choose more commercial listings, if they want?"Now *that* would be cool. I imagine a little slider control (like I recall seeing on an MSN Search Beta site a while back) along a horizontal axis with something like:{-- NON-COMMERCIAL ... COMMERCIAL --}Slide it to the left, and it becomes heavily weighted by .EDUs and non-obviously-ad-studded sites. Slide it to the right, and it becomes weighted with ecommerce and even AdWords listings. Let people decide which mix is best for them.
Yeah Jill, this is the kind of stuff that I drew me to Sphinn in the first place.I would love for that level of control Winooski. Instead of assuming what I want let me decide what I want when I am searching. Just because I look at informational sites most of the time does not mean that I don’t want to find commercial site with other searches.
@winooski - I remember Yahoo Mindset had a slider like that. It was pretty cool. It would be neat to be able to target contextual ads according to known intent, as well -- i.e., for users looking for information, show them articles and reviews, but show users who are ready to buy actual product pages.