Thursday, August 23, 2007

Marissa Mayer at SES 2007

Elinor Mills at CNet summarizes Googler Marissa Mayer's keynote speech at SES 2007.

Some excerpts from the article, focusing on personalization:
For general Web search, personalization is the future, Mayer said.

Ten to 15 years from now search sites will understand more about searchers, where they are located and what their personal preferences are, she predicted.

Mayer said one of the most important data points for improving search relevance based on personalization is the previous query, although Web history and address books could also be helpful "signals" to the search engine.

It is important that the ads are personalized too, she said ... "My philosophy is that the ads and the search results should match ... For me, search and ads are almost the same."
See also detailed notes on Marissa's keynote from Tamar Weinberg.

For more on personalized search, you might be interested in at least a couple of my posts on that topic, including "Personalized Search Primer" and "Effectiveness of personalized search".

For more on personalized advertising, please also see my posts "What to advertise when there is no commercial intent?" and "Is personalized advertising evil?"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mayer said one of the most important data points for improving search relevance based on personalization is the previous query, although Web history and address books could also be helpful "signals" to the search engine.

Frankly, I would call the notion of searching that has been influenced by the user's previous query "search as a dialogue" rather than personalization. You open up a search session, and everything that happens within that session is related. Algorithmically, you can use similar techniques that you use in personalization. But you do not have to.

Some dude talks about it more here, where he says that personalization is just one of a number of techniques for implementing a dialogue-based search approach:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/09/search-as-dialogue.html

:-)