Google has added another twist to which sites will show up on top for some of their users. For people who are signed into their Google accounts, they will now offer personalized results - that is, the sites you tend to click on in the results will show up higher for you, but not for others.

I haven’t noticed the changes much personally myself, but I do have and regularly use a personalized Google homepage. I like my homepage. It has lots of great information on it from blogs and news sites that I like to keep up with.

A lot of webmasters aren’t too happy with this. There’s a great thread about it over at Threadwatch. I definitely agree with the concerns that it will leave Google showing registered users more of where they’ve been, rather than where they want to be.

Others worry about Google manipulating the results you see to coincide with the beliefs of the people at Google. This one worries me less, simply because that could be a potential issue for any search engine, personalization or no. If results can be manipulated manually as well as by algorithm, where does it stop?

It’s certainly an interesting experiment. Will the personalization go by demographics and take advantage of what other Google users with habits similar to yours select?

This is one of those things to think about and keep an eye on. It may not be easy to spot the results of all this, so keep an eye on the forums and blogs to see if any tips on managing personalize results come out.

Technorati Tags: