Jack Menzel

Language is imprecise, but personalization can help fill in the gaps with context - geo, language, previous searches/discussions - and topicality, preference, pattern and social behavior. This must be done in a sensitive way with transparency and control.

SMX means different things to different people, but when we at SMX search SMX we get the conference, not the glasses or car. It's personalized.

Countering Eli's argument Jack says its not perfect and we aren't passive and just going to like it because it's there all the time. Well yeah, that'd be bad. The reality is the machine is not perfect and users have active information needs and look for quality and relevant material. We aren't satisfied by a lot of clicks.

The moral:

• Users maintain control over their data
• Be transparent about how the data is used
• There is no canonical result set for a query

Stefan Weitz

"Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey …and Stefan Weitz

• Not just about re-ranking results
• Highest value, lowest cost
• 5 W's are used and often really a proxy for intent
• Selective personalization - apply different models and within queries they look at what does better with personalization
• Personalization is the new normal

Who: Your interests

What: Behaviors - understand what you mean based on previous behavior

When: What time is it?

Where: is Carmen Sandiego?

Why: So Meta - why do these type of people do this type of thing?

SEARCH

Social - deal with Facebook to show likes. Brings relevance (re-ranking) results. If you like something on Facebook, Bing maps the like to the domain off Facebook. Term is "entity collapse."

Contextual - term is "implicit local." Where you are determines what you see when you search for restaurants,  movies, etc.

Personal

• Personalized NAV - if you go back to similar results a lot, it will get re-ranked based on clikcs it gets from you.  Restrict to navigational queries.
• Adapted search -  Uses search history to promote based on other words you search for. Understand the category of results on page and looks at comparison between regular search and your focus of searches.  (Bing blog about this - I will link as soon as I can)

Dynamics - As information is changing since you may have searched last, they personalize content with "New Content" tags.

Presentation -  Answers based on past, beyond re-ranking to tailor results to you.

what about serendipity? (asked Eli Pariser) 

queries that are interesting and aren't super relevant are most likely to contain serendipitous results.

Bottom line: Things interesting and not relevant had higher personalized score than the relevant and boring results.

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Any questions?

Results that rank high on Google are highly shared on Facebook, so they don't need that data… do they?

Balance privacy of ppls searches versus ability for ppl to optimize their content.

Who are you trying to optimize for? There are no tools that can show you class of person and as much as you can approximate, they can't show you what they are seeing when searching.

Personalized Search isn't hurting SEO. Now your company doesn't have to be relevant everyone where global relevancy isn't important.

Do we need to know its a socially derived result?

Online Reputation Management (ORM): The engines really want there to be truth and not provide censored information. It's a balance.

If logged out, but still have cookies logged, will I get personalized data? If you have been doing a bunch of searches about Ford cars, your computer will have the "adaptive search"/previous queries attached. If you sit down on someone else's computer, it won't know you've changed unless you log in.

For bing, you can log out of Bing and get rid of Facebook personalized results. Also if you get rid of search history it will affect adaptive query.

Google - log out, turn off personalization and go to a very different place… space?

Adaptive search on Bing is cookie based and holds your info for 28 days.

How about Twitter? Bing has relationship with Twitter. Integration into mainline search may come out soon? Is RT the same as a like? or a +1?

Bing will take the API for +1 when it is available.

When will Bing make a social network? ha. Good question Danny Sullivan!

Links or social - Which is more important? Google: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer! Write your content with your friends…?