On December 4, 2009, Google announced that they were rolling out personalized search to everyone, whether you are logged in or not. Your personalization will be based on your past 180 days of search activity, using information stored in an anonymous browser cookie.

Have you noticed personalization yet? If you are unsure, here’s how you can tell if your results are personalized or not. Note: Not all results are personalized.

I ran a Google search for “cars," and directly above the search results there is a link that says “View customizations.” This tells you that the results you are seeing are personalized. So far, I have only noticed the personalization on broad searches.

There are a couple ways to turn off personalization:
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I remember taking a journalism class back in college where the professor harped on using the same adjectives more than once in a story. He urged us to be more creative to come up with different adjectives, and would even dock points if we duplicated words. Since then, I’ve always had a thesaurus at my desk.

Admittedly, this was before today’s search engine revolution, with its emphasis on keywords. Now, instead of using a thesaurus to help write a press release we turn to the Keyword Tool on Google AdWords, which allows you to test keywords or phrases and see how often they are being searched. You don’t want to select words with poor search results.

This presents a dilemma for many writers who like to use their official company lingo, abbreviations, or even generic wording (e.g., the word
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Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has been supported by a generous advertising budget and drawn some interest from a variety of sources. But how does it affect business-to-business?

Do we have to create new pages or even entirely new sites, as some have suggested?
We may not know the definitive answers for some time. But right now, it looks as if the answer is no.

Microsoft own position is that good content, appropriately coded, will do well in Bing.
Assuming then, that B2B marketers will not need to take extra programming or content steps to take advantage of Bing, how will B2B audiences react? Will they be lured away from Google by Bing’s nifty new features, including categorized search, quick tabs and related searches?
The jury is still out on that point.
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