An optional personalization service from Google will know if you’re a music lover or a dedicated angler.
You may enjoy spending your spare time aboard a boat, calmly casting your line in the water in the hopes a bigmouth bass will wander along and latch onto it.
Or, you may like to jam in your garage with your musically inclined friends, while thumping out the bass line to U2’s “New Year’s Day” on your pre-CBS Fender Precision.
You may even enjoy both. But typing ‘bass’ into a search engine may give you results for one or the other. Type in ‘polish’ and you could get a history of Eastern Europe or a list of shoe care products.
The way to get around this would be if the search engine could tell a musician from a fisherman, or a historian from a cobbler. Google thinks its beta of Personalized Search will do just that.
Personalized Search takes the existing Search History feature for Google account holders a step further. By looking through the history, Personalized Search should be able to discern a user’s interests and present query results more relevant to that user.
Users can turn the feature off and on as they wish. A Google spokesperson says that a search that doesn’t fit into a person’s history will simply return the usual query results unfiltered, too.
While Google will be storing the information related to Personalized Search on its servers, users can easily avoid this by not signing in to a Google account and using the service.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
