Having the opportunity to read The Search was really interesting for me. I first started interning in the Web Department of our company in 2004, around the time the book was written. I still remember checking our organic rankings in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL) and participating in our first pilots in Overture, Google, and smaller search engines not even mentioned in the book like Dogpile and MetaCrawler. The team was very uncertain on how to approach the campaigns and what would work on our very limited budget. As you may have guessed from reading the book, it worked, and it worked well.
As much as I enjoyed the book's historical rundown, what I found most interesting and to an extent, fascinating, is how much of the book's speculation has become or is on a clear road map to become a reality. Most notably, vertical search and the use of click streams to determine relevant search results.
Battelle initially characterized vertical search as up and coming but felt the market(s) for vertical search were somewhat limited. In his (final) update chapter, he notes that there had been significant growth in this area and perhaps the growth was not so limited. In the work I do, vertical networks (driven by vertical search) are nearly as important, if not just as important, as Google and Bing. I cannot speak for other industries in terms of importance, but I do know vertical networks have grown quite a bit and are critical to us.
Battelle also speculated that search technologies would begin using click streams as data inputs to serve relevant results to users. I am not sure how this has progressed in terms organic search, but one of the items Google most recently pitched to us was retargeting (or remarketing as Google calls it) via AdWords (sponsored) search. Retargeting is essentially serving advertisements to Web users that have already come to your site (information collected in user click streams). Usually companies do this to capture visitors that left their sites without converting, but there could be other reasons depending on company objectives. This platform has become very popular within Display Ad Networks.
While I'm not completely sold on the merits of retargeting on these platforms, particularly in the way many companies that specialize in it have tried to sell us on it (I'll save that rant for another post), I see a lot of promise for retargeting/remarketing in AdWords. The primary difference in my mind is that retargeted users in display networks are specifically sought out because they had come to some site at some point in the past. In AdWords, however, users have to essentially call themselves out by taking an action (showing an intent) relevant to the advertiser before they are served a retargeted ad (much to the point of the book of course).
I have not had the opportunity to try this new retargeting feature in Adwords. I believe it's still in Beta although I had heard it would be released to the public by now. I do look forward to trying it when it does become available to us though and find it very interesting how closely it connects with Battelle's prediction.
Pasted below are some articles/blog posts I think describe this (soon to be) new Adwords feature.
http://blog.microsecommerce.com/index.php/uncategorized/google-remarketing-in-search/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2208956/Google-Launches-Remarketing-in-Search-in-Beta
http://threeventures.com/2013/04/google-adwords-remarketing-for-search/
http://blogs.webtrends.com/2013/01/four-strategic-uses-of-remarketing-lists-for-search-ads/
Also interestingly, at least one engine, DuckDuckGo.com (which Professor Kagan made mention of in class as a possible up and comer), is taking the opposite stand on personalization, using it to market its "superiority". Basically, DuckDuckGo is saying that their engine is better because they don't personalize, they are an advocate of their users' privacy and that good search results should be good for everyone (unfiltered/unpersonalized results mean that you won't miss any results that someone else is served).
The links below provide DuckDuckGo's Privacy Policy and an article on DuckDuckGo's platform. The article also has a short video advertisement from DuckDuckGo that compare Google's personalization procedures with its own procedures. Definitely worth a watch.
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
http://www.webpronews.com/duckduckgo-thinks-you-dont-want-personalized-search-results-2012-10
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