The Death of Search Rankings as a Metric. Everybody FREAK OUT!!!

Ok. That's a little dramatic. But still... it's gonna happen.

At SES last year, Google's Personalized search results were mentioned briefly. Now, this article brings it a little more into focus: http://searchenginewatch.com/3631746.

I think SEW is also being a little dramatic, tho. I've tried to recreate the Personalized search and it took me several tries to get it to happen and it certainly wasn't for any old search phrase.

The good folks over at http://www.reliable-seo.com put the current state of affairs into a little more perspective with their study/report. I highly recommend checking it out.

The short story is that if you're in the Top 4, you're probably gonna be there even if Google personalizes the results (unless SearchWiki is activated, of course). Anything else is subject to some shuffling.

Hope you find this as interesting as I did. Enjoy.