7 replies to this topic

[Misscj]

Hi,

I'm looking for stats - how many people have a google account? Be it for gmail, adwords, whatever.

thanks,

cj

[Jill]

Perhaps you want to add a poll to this thread?

[Misscj]

Perhaps you want to add a poll to this thread?

Good idea Jill!

Here is the poll people.

I'm asking this question because of Google personalization. I did a little test today, I asked 15 people to do the same search whilst signed into Google. 2 got different results to everyone else.
It's no massive surprise, and you can opt out, but no one seemed to know that you could. I doubt many people would do it. Google have been quite open about personalisation for some time.

Marissa said: ...exploring topics that are unknown to them and we can tell from their search history that they haven't searched for anything in this sphere before. There's no other search like it. They've never clicked on any results that are related to this topic, and, as a result, we actually don't change their query set at all because we know that they need the basic Google results.

But...if you have search for familiar stuff before, your results can be changed.

I have no idea what the weightings would be, I know that info could be used from all your Google activity though, potentially. I also don't know how many results can be personalized, 2, 4,...all of them?

I'm wondering how many people are likely to be signed in.

(It's not the "end of seo" btw)


cj

Edited by Misscj, 25 September 2008 - 02:23 PM.

[CTPhil]

I have 4 Google accounts

[Randy]

And just to point out the obvious, people who frequent an SEO forum probably aren't very close to what anyone would call typical users. In fact, most might even be way above the normal level of Power Users.

[Misscj]

And just to point out the obvious, people who frequent an SEO forum probably aren't very close to what anyone would call typical users. In fact, most might even be way above the normal level of Power Users.

It's a sad but a true fact...what am I doing still online at 8:44pm with 9 tabs open and 2 browsers? Off to play Spore now and turn off gmail notifier:)

[torka]

Between Google chat, Gmail, etc. I'm frequently logged in to one or another of my Google accounts, but I have a search bar set up to allow me to search Google with personalization turned off (not that I have it turned on through Google in the first place -- turning it off at the source was one of the first things I did when I initially heard about it -- but I figure I it doesn't hurt to add an extra layer of non-personalization )

Definitely not the average user, I am.

--Torka

[Misscj]

Just an update:

today and yesterday I got lots of people to sign into their Google accounts if they weren't already and to tell me what the top rankings were for a particular term. I did the test signed out, and then signed in. I took screen grabs and told them to send me them too.

A few of us (not the majority) got different results. My client's site is either at #2. #4 or #5 when people are logged in and #3 when they are not.