I was fortunate enough to be asked to MC the SearchInsider Summit in Bonita Springs, Florida on May 6.  As the MC, I get to open each day with a few pithy comments and hopefully insightful observations about the emerging trends and notable events in the search engine space.  As faithful readers of this column, let me give you the inside track on at least one of the names I'll drop regularly. In fact, take a moment to go find yourself a pen to jot this name down, because it will become vitally important to you in the next year or two…

Sep Kamvar

Who, you ask?  As I was writing this I took a quick scan of the regular search marketing columns, including this one, to see how much ink Sep has received in the past week.  It's a great injustice that when Kevin Federline launches his own search engine we all rush (and I use first-person plural intentionally, I know I wrote about it too) to add our insightful commentary to the buzz is surrounded this relative nonevent.  But when perhaps the most important announcement to be made in the search space in years happened last Thursday, it passed with nary a whisper.  A quick search on Google News showed that the only blogging about this announcement, other than Google's official post, was a couple of blogs I did on my own site that got picked up in a few other places.  Danny Sullivan also wrote a fairly lengthy post on the announcement. But other than that, not a ripple on the normally turbulent waters of the Internet.

Meet Sep Kamvar

Sep Kamvar could become one of the most important people at Google very quickly.  In fact, his name could become as well known as Larry and Sergey.  Last Thursday, Google announced that they were adding Web History to their search personalization algorithm.  Sep is the guy behind the algorithm.  I've been blogging and writing about personalization for the last few months, telling everyone that they have to pay attention to this.  But other than a handful of people that I’ve spoken to recently, I don't think that most search marketers or users get how important this potentially is, not just for search but for online marketing in general.  The lack of pick up on Google’s announcement is evidence of this. Three weeks ago I wrote a column called Google's Gargantuan Footprint.  A key piece of that puzzle was Google's ability to move towards behavioral targeting.  At that time, I speculated on how that might happen, and I mentioned the Google Toolbar and it's PageRank feature as one of the key elements.  Less than two weeks later I got an e-mail from one of my favorite PR people at Google, Katie Watson, letting me know that Marissa Mayer wanted to chat with me about their plans for personalization.  Sep Kamvar would be joining her on the call.  I juggled my schedule so I could make that call, because I knew it was going to be important.  I was not disappointed.

History is Being Written

Google is now offering an opt-in option for users to include Web History (all the sites you've visited) as a data set that will power their search personalization.  If one lets themselves think into the near future, the implications of this are vast on several different levels. Being able to roll Web History into Search History and monitoring a user's click stream to help refine search results is a huge step towards disambiguation that will substantially alter our individual search experience.  The question for the user is; are they willing to make the trade-off necessary by providing all this click stream data to Google, with their consent?  The fact is, if you have PageRank enabled on your toolbar, this information is being sent to Google anyway.  But now with Google's move towards opting into Web History, they increase the level of transparency into what information they're gathering and how they will be using that information to refine your search experience.

But it's not the personalization of search results that makes this a sea change.  It's the ability for Google to close the loop around one individual based on their online behavior and use that to offer multiple advertising opportunities across their network.  For the interactive marketer, this represents targeting nirvana.  And if one considers Google's recent acquisition of DoubleClick, combined with their contextual network and the ever spreading web of touch points that Google now controls, my speculation about the gargantuan footprint that Google was leaving on the online landscape move several steps closer to reality.

I simply can not speak enough how important this is to every search user and every search marketer out there.  At the user level, there will probably be very little in the way of noticeable change for the immediate future.  Google's move was simply to give Sep and his team a nice clean opt in database that they can play with to improve the personalization algorithm.  But as Sep and his team begin to refine personalization, expect it to be aggressively rolled into multiple aspects of your Google experience.  It's the engine that will power the future of Google for the foreseeable future.  It will eventually surpass the PageRank algorithm in importance, giving Google the ability to match content to very specific and unique user intent on the fly. 

And for that reason, Sep Kamvar is a name to pay attention to.

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