Search tools are being expanded to give customers more personal searches
1 March 2004
The next-generation of search technology, search personalisation, will be able to use a person's web-searching habits and demographic information to display individualized search results.
Internet search engines are gearing up for a battle for users, with the news that Yahoo! and Microsoft are both developing their own technology to rival search king Google.
Web users continue to demand faster and more relevant search results and the new technology needs to respond to this, though there are questions raised about privacy and implementation on a large scale.
Google, Yahoo, America Online, Microsoft and many smaller companies have already invested in the technology. Personalised search technology can track users' searches and give them results based on a profile rather than the most popular results for the whole Internet community.
'You look at search engines, and what they give you is what most people think is relevant,' Jim Pitkow, CEO of Moreover Technologies in San Francisco told the San Jose Mercury News. 'But if you're a minority user, or have a minority interest, you won't get what you want in the first page of results.'
Mr Pitkow has developed personalised search technology at Outride, a company he co-founded. Google bought Outride two years ago and has not said what it plans to do with the technology.
Meanwhile, Yahoo vice president Jeff Weiner emphasised the importance of personalisation last month and added, 'The better we understand the user, the better our results will become'.
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