Google to use recent searches to fine-tune results
Google Operating System reports that Google will start to personalize search results based on the previous query or even a number of previous queries. The post reports:
Until now, Google personalized the results based on the search history only for users that were logged in and enabled the Web History service. Google created a profile from your search history and used it to disambiguate your queries and slightly alter the rankings for pages that were likely to match your interests.
The new signal for personalizing results (recent searches) should work without having to log in and could influence the results in a different way. In many cases, people constantly refine their queries by adding or removing keywords, but Google and other search engines don’t use all these refinements to improve the results in real time. By connecting the related searches from a session, Google will understand more from what you intend to find and should deliver better results.
I have always disabled cookies from Google because I am not sure I like the idea of Google tracking all my searches. I’m not sure how that affects this new method.
Incidentally, one of the comments on the post gives a method to find out what Google has as your search history. I have deliberately prevented a search history so I don’t know how well this works but here is the procedure:
You can download your search (web) history as a RSS feed:
http://www.google.com/history/lookup?output=rss&num=100
(replace 100 with the number of items you want in the feed)
To restrict the items to web searches and remove image searches, Google News or the web history, use:
http://www.google.com/history/lookup?st=web&output=rss&num=100
Tags: Google