Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant

Google tinkering with personalisation (or personalization, if you prefer). http://labs.google.com/personalized allows you to set a profile showing your interest or lack of in various subjects, then you can min-max the search results generated in terms of their sensitivity to your personalisation preferences.

Rather worryingly, when setting all my business services, internet, retail, technology and other preferences, and then searching for me, I was demoted when I then maxxed the personalisation!

Given that we know Google track which results are clicked on from any page, then this initiative can help them build levels of user-profiled relevance for particular pages of content. And from an optimisation (or optimization) point of view, this will only help relevant pages get to closer to their audiences.

So, when it comes to the next decisions about Google SEO it seems to me that it will be largely business as usual, however, as my own mini-test demonstrated, it may not be traffic as normal. And if you are anaylsing your traffic carefully you will be able to tell if this is a good thing or not.

Incidentally, I use Indextools.com on a number of projects, as a great, entry-level page-tagging web analytics tool, and I have been recommending it to all my clients who are struggling with useful web stats intelligence. And yes, the link above is an affiliate link. I am afterall making good business for IndexTools, I may as well benefit from it too :-)

Google dominates search in the UK. Hitwise UK have released their latest Search Report covering the period of May 2005 showing that Google's share of search activity in the UK - crucially the share that actually leads to a visit to a third party site - is a very significant 69%. (The table below is taken from the report and shows how dominant Google is. The copy below the table comes from Hitwise's newsletter - I can't find it on their site to link to.)

Google.co.uk refers 61.49% proportion of UK searchers to web sites.
Google.com refers 7.39% proportion of UK searchers to web sites.

The fact that I am a Google Consultant makes Google's dominance very reassuring. I knew I was focusing my efforts in the right place for my clients, but I wasn't sure exactly by how much! 50% was my previous estimate, so now I will happily tell everyone that it is 70%.

Joking apart, the fact that Yahoo and MSN only have about 8% of the share of the search market each surprised me, along with Ask's 8% proportion matching MSN and Yahoo.

The report is definitely worth getting hold of as the data from Hitwise proves itself time and again in projects I work on. I have provided a contact link to Hitwise below.

Hitwise newsletter copy:

Hitwise releases its UK Online Search Report How much of the search market does Google control? Do internet users search differently on different search engines? Are there still search term gems out there that won't cost me an arm and a leg?

The recently released Hitwise UK Online Search Report answers these questions, reporting on share of the search market held by each of the leading engines, the audience profile of the various search engines, consumer search behaviour and the degree to which search terms continue to be underutilised.

Click here to request a copy of Hitwise UK Online Search Report.

Key findings of the report are:

- The combined forces of Google UK and Google.com account for two-thirds of internet searches.

- Different search engines attract a different audience profile. Understanding these differences will help you understand where to apply your search marketing budget based on the audience you are trying to attract to your website.

- Not only do the search engines attract a different profile of user, but they also search differently on the various search engines. More than half of searches on MSN.co.uk Search are one word search phrases while searches on Ask tend to be more specific than average.

- Consumers also search differently depending on the industry sector they are trying to reach. For example, consumers shopping for fashion and accessories search most often for high street brands. However, these firms are much more reliant on visits from searches on their brand than their pure-play competitors.

- 95% of search terms are underutilised - which means that retailers are either not optimising to or bidding on terms for products that consumers are searching for and that are sold on their site. The analysis considered search terms sending visits to the top five Apparel and Accessories sites and found that the average gap (i.e. missed search opportunities) was 95%. This means that on average only 1 in 20 search terms sending visits to these sites represent an overlap.