WHAT'S NEXT -- KNOWING WHAT YOU'RE WEARING?

Google's personalized search has a lot of people's panties in a ringer--now that the search giant has announced that they're customizing EVERYBODY's search experience with their Personalized Search.

Of course, you have a lot of paranoid paintball playing computer nerd types who think everything is a government conspiracy who exercised their option to turn personalized search off, amid the usual "nobody's gonna tell me" speeches and thinly veiled threats to shoot anyone who doesn't support the second amendment. (Trust me, it all goes together. Just go to a science fiction convention.)

Normal thinking people, however, have greeted the news of personalized search much as I suspected you (and I know I) did: Who gives a fuck? If I search for a pizza parlor, I WANT to see pizza parlors near me, and not some jackoff in Omaha who figured out how to buck the Google system.

The more I work in this business the more amazed I am at the geek-vs.-the-world gap. Whenever the SLIGHTEST move is made by Google, SEO companies all over the world shit a brick and start burning down the building to collect on their insurance. But what I'm finding is that SEO is a lot like politics: Extremists make all the noise, and nothing much happens one way or the other.

Personalized search isn't going to hurt SEO; it's just going to make the job more interesting, and as a result, BETTER. Isn't that what most SEO experts want?

TT