Is Personalization a Goner? No, but User Control Is.
November 2, 2013
I read a really big headline with lots of pictures in “iGoogle’s Demise May Toll the Bell for the Personalized Home Page.” I don’t have any big grumble with the write up. Google killed iGoogle. The angle of attack in the story is to explain that iGoogle is a dead service.
The point in the write up I noted was:
iGoogle fell victim to one of the company’s periodic round of service trimming, as Google general manager of global enterprise search Matt Eichner spelled out on Google’s official blog 16 months ago. At the time, Eichner explained that iGoogle was no longer necessary given new app-like interfaces within Google’s Chrome browser and the ChromeOS and Android platforms. The AJAX-based iGoogle used app-like widgets for users to organize and customize information on their iGoogle pages, and Google saw this as redundant.
Okay, received wisdom. I learned a long time ago that I am not good at received wisdom. For the Web surfer and Google clueless, the trimming of services is just another indication of Google’s superior management and technology. Rah, rah.
The problem for me is that Google’s personalization is not dead. What’s been killed is explicit user control over personalization. Google now personalizes information displayed to a user. If you want to see how this works, snag a laptop and get some Google user to log in. Have the person run a query. Then grab your laptop and log into Gmail. Now while you are logged in, run the same query. Check out the content displayed, the ads, and the speed with which the page renders.
If the displays are identical, you are hooked to an evil twin or those two queries have been filtered in an identical way. When I ran this little test in my law enforcement and intel lecture on October 29, 2013, the results were different.
Personalization is important to Google’s ad revenue. It is not important to the user who wants to fiddle with what he or she sees from a Google query.
Personalization is not dead. User control is or on its last legs. How easy is it to find MyYahoo on the newly redesigned Yahoo? Yahoo is moving down the same path I opine.
When you search, are you getting objective results? In my view, if you can’t answer this question backed by your experience and objective test results, you are not sure what Google is doing, just like azure chip consultants, former middle school teachers, and unemployed webmasters. How can you control what is not known or understood?
Stephen E. Arnold, November 2, 2013
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