15 May 2006 | Author: Scott McBay

Is the SERP as we know it running out of time?

With search engines focussing more on personalised search is the search engine results page going to die out?

First let's look at what Google have been doing to fuel personalised search. Google Desktop, Google Accounts and more recently Google Gadgets, Google CO-OP and Google Notebook which has not yet been officially released are set up to gather end user specific information about the habits and preferences of the people who are using these services. This will give a wealth of information to the search engines who can then tailor both paid search and organic search results.

So if both paid and organic search results are going to be affected by personalisation. The results being delivered to people will be more in line with the user habits and search history. What I am presented when entering a keyphrase may be completely different to what you are presented.

So in the future will rankings become redundant because of personalised search?

Let us look into the Crystal Ball and make a prediction.
Rankings will not be redundant as people will not always use personalised search. There will be a shift from driving traffic purely through rankings and the focus may shift to driving traffic to sites and increasing the conversion rates through a range of different techniques.

This is going to present a new challenge to SEO companies and it will be interesting to see what happens. The big question is will personalised search actually take off? Or it is a little bit too much like big brother watching over us.

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