Summary: How Google's search history tool increases the personalization of search. Implications and marketing opportunity for small business.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by how difficult it is to keep track of your internet searches, then Google has the product for you. Just out, in beta, is Google’s new search feature called “My Search History,” which can store all your Google queries, along with their results. Not only can Google store your results, it also stores your “behavior,” and starts tracking it over time, thereby “personalizing” your results. All this can be yours, from any computer, by accessing the Google home page. Sign up is required.

The real story here is not the privacy issue. That battle was lost a long time ago. It’s not the “cool” technology. That’s starting to be a yawn. It’s not even the ability to retrieve previously-made searches, nice as that is. The real story here is about the potential for consumer brand loyalty to their own search results history, and what that means to website owners and advertisers.

What Google is doing with its new search history tool is building up a backlog of searches that a user has made. Once the history has been started (it is not retroactive, but begins when you sign up) Google begins to analyze the trends, and cluster the searches into groups or categories. And here is the crucial part of the new application: when you make a new search on Google, not only do you get new results, but you get your own history of similar searches, plus Google’s suggestions for the most relevant of your search results. It’s like having an instant memory, at the click of a mouse. Given how overwhelmed everyone is these days, this is an application that could really take off.

This has enormous implications for website owners and advertisers. It means that in the red-hot sphere of internet searching, millions of Google users, with no effort on their part, will now be building their own portfolio of “favorite” search results. As they perform new searches, over time, their previous search results will be “personalized” to match the new query, and served up adjacent to new results. It is a big boost to entrenched advertisers in the search results pages, and a big incentive for marketers to pay increasing attention to getting on the “free” or “organic” side of Google search results. Our advice to our own clients, at http://www.SmallBusinessOnline.net, will be to pay attention now to the sea change this may ultimately bring. “Personalized Search” is the next logical step for the big search engines, whose goal is to make internet searching faster, easier, and more relevant for the user. Since Google has just taken a big step in this direction, it is crucial for smart businesses and website owners to stay ahead of the curve.

The pace of change at the big search engines is almost dizzying, as these highly-successful companies (witness Yahoo’s latest profit numbers) outbid each other in the fight to win customer loyalty. “Personalization” of search results is a big component of the present battle. Consumer behavior in this area is being impacted in a major way by the actions of companies like Google and Yahoo. While it may not yet be clear where it will end up, it is very clear that any business or marketer with any investment at all in the future of the internet should be sitting up and taking notice.