The news was documented on Google’s Official Blog. In order to provide better search engine result pages to its users, Google is extending the Personalized Search feature previously used by users ‘signed-in’ to their Google Accounts. There are several blogs claiming that the change was “Permanent” so it seems Big G has already applied the new feature on its ‘almighty’ search engine.

You could view this report on Google’s blog or you could view the video excerpt below from Google engineers explaining the extended personalized search.

In simplest terms, with personalized search, it would be harder for so-called SEO experts and newbie bloggers to be on top of Google’s SERPs. When a user enters a particular keyword say “Mobile Phones”, Google will show pages based on the user’s browsing activity in past. Thus, even if your site is ‘optimized’ for that  particular keyword you’re not assured that you’ll rank well in Google SERPs.

However, this whole idea could possibly be altered. In the past, Google pointed out that signed-in users can delete/disable this search customization from their account. The same goes for “signed-out” users (users who don’t have Google accounts). Google offers them an option to delete the “anonymous” cookie in their browsers to disable this option. The question is: Who would bother to do that? Perhaps only a few individuals but normally people don’t care about the search results coming out of their screen as long as they can get the information they want.

We don’t have enough information to conclude yet if this move was part of Google’s new search engine architecture – caffeine. Matt Cutts shared some new features of caffeine which will be tested in a data center before the holidays before it will be deployed in full by January 2010.

Finally, the best solution most bloggers recommend is to think of other ways to increase traffic to your blogs/sites and not to depend solely on search engines as a way to drive visitors. We agree.

For more information about Google’s new policy on personalized search you may visit these links:

Personalized search for everone

More details on personalized search

How Google customize results

How to turn off personalization