Providing personalized search has become a big focus for sites like Yahoo and Google, but the CEO of Clusty.com’s parent company Vivisimo thinks search personalization is a dead end.
“Search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists,” wrote Raul Valdes-Perez in a whitepaper pointed out by John Battelle. Valdes-Perez lists five reasons why the quest for more users of personalized search, one that has Google and Yahoo promoting search personalization heavily, is a waste of time. We’ll summarize those reason here:
1) People’s interests change frequently.
2) Search engines use weak data to personalize search.
3) Using data from the whole page visited from a search may be misleading because people visit sites based on a title and a short snippet of text in the search engine result.
4) In households, frequently shared computers among family members could skew results.
5) Short queries don’t give the search engines enough to determine one’s interests.
Point number three could be the strongest point Valdes-Perez makes, due to the proliferation of spam blogs and scraper sites in search engine results. Someone clicking on one based on its entry in a search result page and finding it’s a useless site will exit it quickly. Will personalization take those quick visits into account?
The argument for point one, where interests change, makes sense from a short-term perspective. “Seasonal phenomena like elections, the Olympics, sports leagues, etc. also lead to variable interests: I’ll follow the Olympics for the next month or so, but will pay no attention for another four years,” Valdes-Perez wrote.
But the ongoing use of personalization over a long-term should build a more accurate search experience. That of course depends on the skill of the engineers who create that experience.
Points two and five are essentially the same. Short one or two word queries make for weak data. Again, that could be mitigated over long-term use. The fourth point doesn’t apply to personalization schemes like Google’s Personalized Home or Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 because both of them require a user to login. Users might forget to logout from time to time, though, but probably not enough to mess up the results.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
