Googlebomb
Google’s announcement this week that they will begin personalizing search results based on opt-out cookies and not opt-in accounts has stirred up the following pots:
Privacy
Google will use a cookie to keep track of 180 days of your search history, and it will then use the information it gleans to improve the quality of your results. Don’t like the idea of the information giant knowing what you’re looking for? You’ll need to actively disable the feature. You know what? I like this move, even though I dislike the need to make it opt-out. But I understand. The average user has no motivation to turn this feature ON, but the privacy-sensitive will definitely be motivated to turn it OFF. Google has decided to annoy a small group to improve the product for the whole user base.
The incorporation of live micro-blogging posts in search seems gimmicky to me. Has it been included simply to keep up with Bing? Regardless, brand managers are nervous. Twitter noise previously remained on Twitter, and if you weren’t among the small minority of people involved on that site, you didn’t hear any of it. No more. Whatever is said about a brand on Twitter now appears on Google, where A LOT more people will read it. So get a-twittering, marketing folks, if you weren’t already!
SEO
There is an entire industry built around helping website owners increase the ranking of their sites on search engines. I imagine these business are a bit dazed right now. This isn’t a tweak to Google’s Page Rank algorithm, this is a land shift. But I don’t think it’s necessarily bad for them or their clients. Any site that employs “black hat” tactics to rank highly (including keyword stuffing, doorway pages, link farming, etc) will suffer. Because they focus on tricks rather than providing desirable content and establishing authority, they’ll find themselves soon shut out of most Google searches. But the sites that invest in “white hat” development (code and site optimization, content creation, conscientious link building) will be well rewarded.
I’m willing to say the good outweighs the bad.