Put most simply, personalized search is the delivery of search engine results that are uniquely tailored to both keyphrases and individual searchers. For example, in the early days of search, everyone searching for the phrase “AMD” would get the same results, whether they were interested in silicone chips or semiconductors, or age-related macular degeneration. With personalized search, the search engines are beginning to gauge a user’s intent and differentiate between those users looking to invest in AMD, the searchers looking to buy AMD chips, and those looking to care for their eyes.How are search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask able to provide these customized search results? By tracking their users’ behavior online. Search engines have access to a wide range of user data, including search history, bookmarked pages, and more, that allows them to gauge a searcher’s “intent”.
Isn’t That What Amazon Does?
Personalized search is often confused with the product bundling found on sites such as Amazon.com. While similar in many ways, what makes personalized search different is that based on the searcher’s intent. Product bundling, on the other hand, uses product grouping to achieve a similar result.
Why Does Personalized Search Matter?
Personalized search is important because many feel it represents the next logical step in search technology. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask are all either releasing or developing their own personalized platforms in order to consistently provide results that are much closer to what their searchers are looking for and improve the overall relevance of their search results.
What Are the Implications for Pharma?
Personalized search not only has the potential to change how people search, it also has the potential to change how people market and sell products, including pharmaceutical products, online. While no one can say for sure what the long-term implications of personalized search will be, some of the short-term effects may include:
Reduced Competition for High Value Keyphrases - Personalized search may effectively reduce the competition for many high-value keyphrases, including common acronyms and one-word terms (such as allergy). This, in turn, has the potential to make high rankings for these keyphrases much more attainable and much more likely to be a part of a web site’s keyphrase strategy.
Improved Audience Targeting - By reducing the number of irrelevant search results, personalized search will increase the likelihood that the audience that will see your ads and/or web pages in search results will be interested in your products or the condition you’re treating. This improved audience targeting may also result in a slight decrease in non-relevant ad impressions which will be more than offset by higher click-through and conversion rates.
Increased Reliance Upon Non-Branded Websites - Another possible implication of personalized search is a greater reliance upon non-branded websites to maintain visibility with searchers who select non-commercial search results.
Greater Reliance On Traffic Metrics - As personalized search becomes more and more prevalent, search engine results pages will vary widely from user to user, even for the same keyphrase. This will make traffic reporting even more critical.
What’s Next?
Nothing yet. Personalized search is still an emerging technology and it is unclear how it will be ultimately implemented. Therefore, Catalyst on-line, like many search marketing experts, is currently focused on closely monitoring this developing technology and waiting until more is known before taking advantage of this next evolutionary step in search.
For more information email us at info@CatalystSearchMarketing.com
