Google betas personal search

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 29 Jun 2005 at 14:46

Following Google Video - and its searching of video, which we reported yesterday - comes Google's Personalized Search.

To be found at www.google.com/psearch, Personalized Search is meant to be an improvement on Google's standard search in that it orders results based on what you've searched for before.

According to Google, by learning from your history of searches and search results you've clicked on, Personalized Search brings certain results closer to the top when it believes that they're most relevant to you.

You can read more in the Help page and Google is requesting feedback to here. Note that you need a Google Account - but not necessarily Gmail - to use the feature.

Note that this is different from the personalisation features introduced in May - Google adds personal touch - whereby Google supported user customisation of its interface, breaking with its philosophy of providing a 'clean' home page.

But it does build upon the My Search History tool, which was introduced in April - quickly followed by Yahoo!'s version. These offered ways of breaking down searches of searches... all very introspective, but built towards the ultimate goal of better identifying what you are truly searching for.

Once again this Google service is in 'beta' form - just like all its other services - which is fast becoming a meaningless term where Google is concerned. There was a time when companies avoided version 1.0 software by quickly moving to version 1.1, but Google, it seems prefers to avoid it by staying in beta. We are not holding our breaths for this 'pre-release' code to be polished into version 1.0 any time soon...