I often wonder what search will look like in five years. Five years ago I was afraid that organic search would go away and everything would be pay-to-play. Well, that hasn’t happened. In fact, we seem to be seeing a revival of organic search with MSN’s new engine and a revitalized AskJeeves.com.

There is no doubt that search will continue to move toward personalization and local search. How far it can go is unquestionable. How far it will go is yet to be seen. Regular users won’t use personalization tools unless it is easy and seamless.

Another interesting thing to think about is how search engine marketers will optimize in an increasingly personalized search engine world. We have a hard enough time optimizing for the four major engines… How do you optimize for nearly 900 million individual users?

Yahoo is experimenting with personalized search pretty heavily and they have made some of the tools available in beta. Yahoo! Mindset is the most interesting to me. It allows a user to adjust their search results (in real time) based on a sliding scale from “shopping” to “researching.” They call this “intent-driven search.” MyWeb from Yahoo! allows you to save pages, tag and share pages within your “community.”

Yahoo! also offers the ability to save or block sites from your search results in its regular search listings as well - I believe this is a part of the MyWeb implementation. Blocking a site will keep it from showing up in your search results for future queries and saving it will save a cached copy to search later, as well as a link to the page.

Here are links to the Yahoo! tools mentioned. It’s worthwhile to start tinkering with them now and thinking about the future of search for you and your customers.

Yahoo! Mindset Beta
My Web 2.0 Beta


Tagged as: Yahoo