I should have known as soon as I saw the speaker roster. Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Michael Gray and myself on the same panel. Guess who got the lion's share of attention in the Q&A and after session scrum? Michael and I might as well have checked out early and hit the Google Dance before the crowds.The title of the panel at the inaugural SMX in Seattle was Search Personalization: Fear or Fear Not. As Danny often does, he set the panel up to generate a little debate: Michael Gray vs Google, Yahoo vs Google. I was like Switzerland, in neutral territory. Danny did get his conflict, with Michael taking a few shots at Google and Tim Mayer throwing down the gauntlet about the lack of transparency on Google's personalized search results.

Guess What? SEO's are not your Average Search User!

To be honest, I was a little taken aback that the audience didn't jump all over how personalization was going to change SEO. Most of the questions from the crowd centered on how you opt out of personalized search and why personalization wasn't good for them. I have some issues with that, which of course I'll share in this column:

- First, this crowd was trying to argue from a user's point of view. Okay, they're SEO's (this was the organic track) and most of them have been using search since Lycos was a little baby spider. Just how typical do you think these users are?

- Secondly, I question their motives. Do they hate personalization as a user, or as an organic optimizer? My guess is the later, but it just doesn't seem to be very noble to joust with Google because they're making your job harder. Far better to cry foul as a user than as a PO'd organic optimizer. Like somebody said to me after, do you really think Marissa Mayer is losing sleep because the Google user experience for SEO's isn't all they want it to be?

- This was a perfect opportunity to start planning for the new world of SEO, post personalization. There's a ton of value we can add, as smart, pro-active practitioners, but I didn't see anyone take the opportunity to delve into this. Perhaps the really smart ones were keeping their mouths shut, content to let their competitors bitch about the inevitable while they plotted their take over.

- I found everyone fixated on the current threshold of personalization on the page, taking comfort in the fact that it's only impacting a small number of searches. I reminded them that this threshold is a totally arbitrary one set by Google, and could (and will) change at any time.

- Everyone taking a siloed view of personalization, looking at the organic results in isolation. It's almost like they're assessing the amount of damage control required. I'm not sure they realize the import of personalization. This is a rule changer, a paradigm shifter. This is the new generation of search functionality. It changes the game dramatically. Whatever happens on the organic side will roll over to the sponsored side. It will drive universal search. It will drive everything.

- Finally, this is not just happening on Google. Microsoft's recent comments made it very clear they're thinking long and hard about personalization. Tim Mayer cautioned me not to make the mistaken assumption that just because Google was first out with personalization, they're the only ones working on it. In fact, Matt was quite delighted when he found an article in the Times Online where Yahoo VP Tapan Bhat confessed at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam that Personalization was the future of the Web, including search. You can define personalization in a number of different ways, but however you do it, it dramatically changes our online experience.

So, I leave you with this. I went into the SMX session with four fundamental changes I see emerging from personalization that SEO's and SEM's have to think about, right now. No one asked me for the slide deck after the session. There was not one question about strategies for leveraging personalization. Everyone was more interested in grilling Matt on why the opt-out link disappeared from the results page. Although I'm tempted to join the smart and silent search marketers, I think I'll make one last attempt to share this with the SEM/SEO community. Perhaps in a white paper, perhaps a future column. But I'm only going to do it if you're serious about pushing the envelope into this new opportunity. Drop me an email (gord@enquiro.com) and let me know. Otherwise, I'll just shut up and nod my head while you bitch about the fact that it's too hard to opt out of personalized search. You'll excuse me if I don't answer; you see, my mind is on something else.

Recently, I had the idea to perform a test that truly tested the relevance of the search results themselves; on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.  My thought was this; when you look at the results themselves, they are not that different, so why does Google have nearly 64% of the search market share (according to Hitwise) where MSN sits in a distant third with less than 9%?  

Is there something we’re not considering here?
Does Google just make it easier to do what you need to get done?

I think the answer to both of these questions is yes.  There are some things that we’re not considering here, and having a background in graphic design made it easy for me to have an affinity for what’s being missed.  As Marissa Mayer will admit, Google is very focused on the end user quite passionately and I’m sure that a part of that market share can be attributed directly to that fact, and maybe more than just a part.The gist of our study involved a single page of results on paper from each of the big three engines using the same keyphrase, in this instance we chose “digital camera”.   We passed this around a small sample of people and had them choose what they felt the top 3 most relevant results were out of the entire list, not on each page.

Not only were the results surprising, but they were completely backwards from what we and every other search marketer would have expected.  

When we scored the results (3 points for 1st choice, 2 points for 2nd choice and 1 point for 3rd), MSN came out as having far and away the most relevant results.  The margin was not just a 10% or 15% margin, MSN was more than 3 times as successful as Google in terms of its relevance.  And when measured against Yahoo, MSN outperformed those results as well, doubling Yahoo’s relevance score.  

It seems that Google is doing many of the other things right in order for their relevance to be perceived as well as it has been.  Their Progressive Disclosure model has allowed them to keep the interface clean and their users well taken care of, as the Google tools they need only show up when they need them.  

Basic design principles are adhered to on the results page and, as much as people mock the simplicity of the homepage, there are more benefits to it than looking clean and tidy.  This “clean and tidy” homepage also keeps the user’s mindframe “clean and tidy” or more focused if you prefer.  There are less distractions to a user’s focus when compared to the portal page for either Yahoo or MSN.  

This is proven through our Eye Tracking 2 whitepaper.  When you compare the condensed pattern on Google results pages against the spread out activity on the busy portal pages, it displays obvious remnants of distraction.   And when you consider that short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven items plus or minus two (Miller, 1956), those distractions are doing more to detrimentally affect the pure search experience by filling our little short-term memories with news, pictures, ads and information… All of which have nothing to do with what we’re searching for.  

So, MSN may have the most relevant results (according to our little panel), but it turns out that it’s more important to do the rest of the search experience up right.  Which begs another bit of insight; it seems that in the phrase, search experience, the word that we would expect to be the most important often isn’t.  

So MSN, or Windows Live Search as you are trying to be referred to as, if you want to put a cork in the leaky dam of market share, put more experience into the search experience.