This is Google’s answer to provide more relevancies in search results. The method provided as of now is iGoogle (a nightmare for any search engine optimization company). Google intends to measure user behavior and then provide customized search results and ads based on the measurement.

Factors such as pages visited in the past, user ranking of blogs, and number of pages visited within a web site, frequency of pages visited, ads clicked upon etc would all be taken into consideration.

Many critics have termed this as an invasion on privacy and hence Google’s slow approach in implementing Personalization.
The patents however paint the story of personalization The Google Way

User Distributed Search and Ads

Suppose you are helping your friend in finding online resources on how to go about buying a car. This is probably the logical sequence of steps you would follow

• Go to www.google.com
• Type in the relevant search query
• Retrieve the results
• Go to individual search result links and analyze the information
• Log into your mailbox
• Compose a mail to your friend
• Copy the link from the URL of the relevant site / alternately copy it from the search results page
• Send mail

Now let’s take a look at the following sequence of steps

• Log into Gmail
• Compose a mail to your friend
• Search using the relevant search query in an interface provided within the mailbox itself.
• Copy the retrieved result/results onto the mail draft using the copy button/
• Send mail

Sounds simple? Well this is exactly what Google has envisioned for the future (again a nightmare for the people in SEO services). As we move toward web 2.0 Communication technologies are also evolving. People now frequently use Messengers, Blogs, Forums, Communities and emails as modes of communication. The use of search engines has also increased with the ever increasing expanse of the web.

The online user more often than not looks towards the search engines to provide him with relevant results.

The synchronization of the communication technologies with search has culminated in User Distributed Search.

Along with the generic search results Google, may also provide advertisements retrieved from an ad server.

The patents also focus on automated retrieval of search results when the user points his mouse over a word or selection.

Once the query is received the results may be retrieved from different content servers such as the Local server, the image server and the general search server.

The results are presented onto the search interface and provide a universal window to all the results.

Each of the search results would either hold a link or a Graphical image link to enable the users to select the relevant search results and copy them onto the mail/messenger/Forums etc. The results copied are also much more pleasing to the eye than a standard link
Once the results are copied the user can easily use the search Interface again.

The usefulness of the patents for advertisers lies in the fact that advertisements can also be distributed. For the advertisers it means that rather than they having to take efforts to target the desired segments, the users themselves do it. It also means that they gain more visibility by having their ad distributed by the users themselves. Due to these implications the patent also mentions the fact that such kind of advertisements may be priced higher than the regular ads
Creators of the content who are willing to put these ads in their content may be rewarded in terms of monetary compensation. The compensation may differ on the value associated with a page. For a blog with high traffic and relevant content the rates could be higher in comparison to a regular e-mail.

The criteria for selecting the advertisements and defining how, when and where an ad may be placed may depend on a host of factors also known as serving factors:

1. Content of the document
2. User Characteristic(language, browser used, cookies etc)
3. An Affiliate site that initiated the request
4. Time of day
5. Day of week
6. Time of year served
7. The document in which the ad was included
8. The type of Document in which the ad was included
9. The size of the ad etc

The Conversion can be defined in one of the following methods:

• The user sees and clicks on an ad which then takes him to the advertiser’s web page. He then makes a purchase before leaving the web page
  
  
• The user sees and clicks on an ad which then takes him to the advertiser’s web page. He then makes a purchase from the web page in a predetermined amount of time (e.g.: 7 days).
  
  
• The user sees and clicks on an ad which then takes him to the advertiser’s web page. He then performs an action: for example filling in contact details or downloading a white paper, signing in for a newsletter etc.