Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt revealed today that Google will focus on the personalization of search as its main tool to fend off rivals MSN and Yahoo. In a bid to improve the lagging relevancy of its search results, Google purchased a Stanford University startup search engine, Kaltix that was designed to track user’s searches and compile user/computer-specific search databases.
As a search technology concept, personalization will likely evolve over time starting with basic context matching and moving to unique user personalization as software and user data matures. As a start, we are strongly recommending webmasters be certain to add specific geographic information on their contact pages (as well as a well-defined text link to their contact pages) including; street address, city or cities in which the business is located, state or province, nation and zip or postal codes. To be safe, it is likely wise to include geographic modifiers in the description meta tags as well.