Personalization session at SES 2007

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable posts notes from the SES 2007 session on "Personalization, User Data & Search".

Let me highlight this tidbit on the results of an eye tracking study:

The personalized [search results] ... doubled the performance (click throughs).

That reminds me of what Googler Marissa Mayer once said:

[Personalization is] one of the biggest relevance advances in the past few years.

Personalization doesn't affect all results, but when it does it makes results dramatically better.

Update: More details on the eyetracking study.

Update: Even more details on the eyetracking study.