Google pushes personalize search

Personalized search is one road into the future of finding. Google is betting on it pretty hard, which means it’s definitely something to watch carefully.

The other road into the future, I think, is social search. Services like del.icio.us (owned by yahoo but stupidly not searchable from Yahoo.com) allow users to search through the tagged database for, theoretically, things that someone has already found useful. What a great way to weed out the chaff.

The difference between the two ideas is what drives it: Google is machine-driven, using massive computers to cycle through each individual Google users search history in order to come up with the results that Google thinks are most relevant to you.

This is a cool concept, but I don’t know if it will work the way I’d want it to. I’ll have to wait and see Google’s implementation.

The del.icio.us approach is human-driven. This is almost, in some ways, the opposite of personalized search. It’s everyone-else search. You go rooting through a massive database of a bazillion things that other people have found, and see if they found something useful.

On a number of occasions I’ve found something through del.icio.us that I didn’t find through Google, Yahoo! or MSN. It’s the power of human attention. Which is pretty cool.