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based on your past searches, location of your access, click-through rates, and other behaviors. After all, the search engines are attempting to provide the best, most relevant results to the searcher, and using a person’s search history will enable the engine to adjust the results as necessary to create that personal relevance. As a result, the rankings you see may differ from those your neighbor sees, simply based on your interaction with the search engine. I expect this practice to continue to grow as the line between privacy and advertising desires becomes increasingly blurred. Many people choose to give up privacy in order to receive more relevant advertising and do not see the risks.

Results Promotion

Google recently instituted a search-results feature called promote results (Figure 3-1). It’s simple. If you like one result over another, simply promote the result by clicking the up-arrow button next to a result. That moves the result to the top of the page, where it will appear whenever you search for the same keyword. Many webmasters see this as a means to affect rankings, but if it does so at all, it is on a very minute scale.

Figure 3-1: Promoting a result

I have seen results promotion used very effectively by marketing managers who are able to go into their boss’s computer and promote their website for specific search terms. That way, to the boss, the company seems to be ranking as number one, so the boss leaves the marketing department alone and stops demanding to know why the website is not ranking first. This is a good illustration of ranking results being misleading!

Multiple Search Engine Data Centers

Each search engine has data centers located all over the world. This makes it effective to serve the millions of simultaneous searches that take place all of the time. For efficiency, each search engine query is routed to the most appropriate data center, which will return results based on its snapshot of the search index. Your co-workers may be sitting right next to you, send the same search query, but see different results because the query was sent to a different data center. Data centers are consistently being updated, and it is very easy to see different results, usually only within a few rankings, from a search of different data centers.

Regional Weighting

A New Yorker searching for the term zoo on Google is likely to get results that show the Bronx Zoo as being the most relevant result. A Google searcher in Southern California will see the San Diego Zoo as number one. Regional searches are being weighted and slowly implemented by the search engines. Obviously, this doesn’t work with all terms, because many are worldwide in scope. However, within the past few years, Google has placed a heavy emphasis on local results, maps, and business listings. Offering searchers local-based results creates more advertising inventory and also connects users to locally based providers. Intentional or not, Google is turning the world market back into a local market. Locally based searches provide a more relevant result to a local searcher.

Social Network

One of my recent searches turned up a surprise, as Google rolled out another beta program that affects the search results. Google showed articles from friends of mine in the first page of results (Figure 3-2). The reason that my friends were in the first page was because I was logged in, had a Google social profile, and Google was recommending other friends’ articles as a result of our social profiles being linked. Without being logged in to my Google account, my friends’ articles would not have appeared in the first page of results.

Figure 3-2: Google Social Circle Beta, showing connected friends’ articles

Continual changes like this Social Profile Suggestion Beta program show the direction that a search engine like Google is heading. Google is integrating social recommendations, multimedia, personalization, and regionalization as a way of customizing search results specific to a person. The more information you provide to Google through your account, the