You know how it is. You do a search for something closely related to your business. Hurrah! You’re at position #1 in the search results. Champagne corks pop. Bonuses are paid. Holidays get booked…
You go to share your good news with a friend or colleague. They don’t see your website anywhere. How can that be? Personalised search.
There is nothing new about this but many people still fall into the trap of confusing ‘their results’ with ‘the results’.
So, what to do?
Via Matt Hopkins on Twitter, I was reminded this morning of a new kid on the search engine block – DuckDuckGo (I know).
They have put out an illustrated guide to ‘Escaping Your Search Engine Bubble‘. Even if you’re a committed user of Google and wouldn’t dream of using any other, this is worth five minutes of your time just so you have a better awareness of how your search results are populated.
By coincidence, those fine people over at SEOmoz have also put out a guide to breaking out of Google personalised search. In his ‘Tools to Hack the Code‘ post, Cyrus Shepard does an excellent job of explaining some options you could use if you want to see ‘the results’. If nothing else, the cartoon is worth a look. Who is #1 for ‘blue magic kittens’ BTW?
If all else fails, buy another computer and never, ever log in to an online profile…
As a footnote, Google’s Matt Cutts has since responded to some of the DuckDuckGo comments.
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