Zite, the personalized magazine app for ipad is pretty cool. They aggregate personalized content from a web crawl, the same way content is aggregated in the indexes of search engines like Google and Bing. Zite then displays articles in reading mode, which makes a much better reading experience. However, the real interesting feature of Zite is the user's ability to personalize their content.
So how can you customize your Zite content? Let me count the ways.
First, you can thumb-up or thumb-down the article itself. This is telling Zite whether you like the content of the particular post. The analog here would be +1 in Google or "like" in facebook.
Second, you can select "get more from." To me, this is really the game changer. You can request more content from a particular source (website/blog) or a specific author.
Third, you can request more content on a particular subject.
And of course, sharing through Zite is seamless.
So what does this have to do with search? Everything.
For better of for worse, search is getting much more personalized. With the addition of social signals into algorithms, the recommendations of people you know are gaining visibility in search engine results pages. While not prominently advertised to the public, you can actually already do a lot of personalizing of your search results through your browser. It is my guess that this is about to change greatly.
If you think about Google Co-founder Larry Page's description of the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want,” then the Zite model for search seems even that much more likely.
If you think about it, Google tries to mathematically decipher relevancy & popularity to deliver you results. However, as they would freely admit, they haven't come up with the perfect algorithm yet. Which means that they must make a choice. They can either stick to their "mathematics only" way, or ask users to help them understand what it is that they want. And really, they are already doing this (think user data, social signals, etc).
And so, don't be surprised to see similar functionality on your search results page. Despite the potential filter side-effects of personalized search, it seems to me that this is the next logical progression for search. Besides, don't we already change the channel, unfriend, unfollow, and block those that are feeding us messages that we don't want? Furthermore, the filter effects of personalized results assume that search engine results are somehow "pure" which is completely inaccurate. All algorithmic search engines have popularity biases cooked right in.
I look forward to the ability to get more search results from my favorite authors and websites. How about you?
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
Gyi - Great article about Zite and I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the state of search. I spoke about how personalization is the flip side of search, which you might be interested in.
-Mark Johnson, CEO of Zite
Mark, thanks for Zite first, and also for taking the time to comment. Zite is THE way I prefer to consumer online content.