From this morning’s keynote with MoveOn.org's board president, Eli Pariser, to The Current State of Personalized Search session with Stefan Weitz, Director of Search at Bing, there’s no doubt that personalized search is all the rage here at SMX. clip_image001

What is personalized search and how is it different from context searches? Context is geography, language, etc. from previous queries. Personalization is topicality, preference, pattern, and social.

How are the personalized search results being created and how is Bing using this? Stefan notes the following:

The 5 W’s: Who, Where, What, When, Why

  • Who: Interests
  • What: Behaviors
  • When: What time it is
  • Where: Carmen San Diego
  • Why: Intent of the search

Here is what Bing is doing with personalization:

Social - Facebook and Bing integration show you searches with likes from your friends, friends in an area, and mutual friends when searching people.

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Personal - When searching on fairly common terms, you could end up with tons of results. Bing offers a personalized navigation that, after a number of interactions going back to similar pages, will re-rank these results to the top, making it a more personalized experience.

Presentation - This refers to what search engines can do differently to present the customer their search results. What is Bing doing? Top secret stuff… as Stefan said, “Nothing we can share as of now – sorry.”

Context - Bing will re-rank based on where you are; searching on “restaurants” while in New York won’t show results for Seattle restaurants.

Dynamics - Bing is looking at how fast content changes on the pages you are searching. With content changing all the time, they are showing the new content to the user by noting it in the search results.

Lastly, what are the pros and cons? One pro is that personalization is working, though the con is that personalization is far from perfect; users have active information needs -- quality and relevance are more than just clicks.

I hope you now have a bit more insight to this new experience and are enjoying this during your own Bing searches!

Until my next post,

Christen Anderson

Global Accredited Professional Lead