What is Intent Based Search?

March 18th, 2009 by admin

Do you agree with ‘intent based search‘? You may have seen Google (Yahoo and others) rolling out intent based advertising for the AdSense platform. Are you afraid that Google is trying to pry into your private life?

Google has always ‘collected’ information on websites – whether it’s through the code you place on sites for AdSense, Adwords, Analytics or Webmaster Central Dashboards. Google collects data from websites on an on-going basis to make search, as a whole, better. Some people think this may violate private policy issues, as both Google and Yahoo make you check a box that says basically you are allowing them to ‘follow’ your every move. The fact is, if you have any Google code placed on your website, then Google does have the ability to use your website information for generating data.

‘Intent based advertising’ in Google AdSense links categories of interest to the user’s browser history – in essence, Google will remember what you’ve search upon and try to place ads strategically for categories that peak your interest (except for categories related to health or children). Someone who has spent time browsing about pages on Dell computers will find ads for Dell computers appearing even when they’re on a site unrelated to Dell computers…it’s all about targeting ads based upon your interests and search history. To read more about this, go here, Google’s Behavior Based Ads.

Behavior Based search was one of the topics that was heavily discussed at PubCon – an annual Internet Marketing Conference that our SEO team attended this year. Google is already doing this with the use of Personalize Search, instead of offering ‘did you mean‘, or actually typing in words for you in the search bar, Google is now carrying this idea over into the AdSense Platform and actually showing ads based upon your search history.

Google has stated that their data retention time is around 9 months, compared to Yahoo’s 90 days policy. Does this perk your interest? Voice your opinion below!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 10:42 am and is filed under Google & Search, SEO & Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “What is Intent Based Search?”

  1. IM Products Reviews Says:
    March 18th, 2009 at 4:20 pm

    Oh? I never think about this before. That is why Google becomes the best web search engine and prefer by many internets user. Internet Marketer must optimize this facility…Great post and thanks a lot Sarah!

  2. G Web Says:
    March 19th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    I think this type of targeting will put a new spin on marketing on search. Its about time, it gives users more relevant results and at the end of the day that is what us users are looking for. Google definitely knows that this is the next level.

  3. sarahlamansky Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 9:29 am

    thanks IM Products! yes, the evolution of intent, personalized, and universial is real and here to stay…glad you enjoyed the post.

  4. sarahlamansky Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 9:30 am

    absolutely. with the advent of pulling in 'tweets' as well into real time search results, the search engines really are moving at warp speed. will be interesting to see what happens in the months to come…

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