November 9, 2005

Personalization of placed content ordering in search results (PDF file) is the actual patent, for your reading pleasure.

Patent reading is never a pleasure for most, of course. That's why it's nice to have someone break it down for you. Who've we got? C'mon over Loren Baker! He takes you through a summary over at Search Engine Journal in his Google Patent : Organic Results Ranked by User Profiling post.

Not enough? Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz is usually all over doing a patent breakdown but hit with time issues, he summarizes Michael Nguyen's in depth rundown, which you'll find here.

Is Google Messing With Organic Algos? from Paul Bruemmer steps beyond the patent to ask what's going on with personalization more generally.

Finally, there's our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Google to Manipulate Organic Rankings with User Profile, where there's lots and lots of discussion.

In particular, I want to highlight my comment in the thread. Like Paul, I'm stressing not what's in the patent (which may or may not be in use) but rather what's actually happening in terms of personalization at Google, Yahoo and elsewhere.

If you're worried about personalization, it's especially a look at what's actually happening now that I'd encourage you to read up on -- and I provide lots of links in that post.