Personalized Search is Google’s attempt at making searches more relevant to the searcher. Using Personalized Search, you can:
- Get the results most relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for in the past
- View and manage your past searches, including the WebPages, images, news headlines and Froogle results you’ve clicked on
- Create bookmarks you can access from any computer
Personalized Search orders your search results based on your past searches, as well as the search results and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can view all these items in your Search History and remove any items you’d like.
Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search results, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve.
Personalised search records your search history and clickthroughs to create a ‘profile’ of the searcher. The more you search and clickthrough, the more precise the profile is, it then uses this profile to alter the displayed search results. For example if you were to search for “transformers”, do you want electrical components or the robots in disguise? This is where personalised search will use your search and click history to eliminate the ‘un-related’ results. So if you have a history of looking at electrical components, the children’s cartoon related results will be removed and vice-versa.