Well, maybe.

William Flaiz, writing in Search Engine Watch asks Are Rankings Still Relevant?. In that column he reviews some of the means by which Google collects data on our search behaviors:

Every fun, timesaving Google feature you use in your daily activities is feeding Google information about you. And if they continue to "not be evil," your searching experience will likely be more in tune with your lifestyle.

But Flaiz's objective isn't to instill us with fear toward what Google knows. Instead, he seeks to convince us that Google's accumulated information may ultimately personalize our searches. The trend he identifies is a decline in the value of somebody else's opinion toward a particular site, and an increase in Google's ability to actually predict that the site contains information that we're interested in finding.

Flaiz is basically writing for marketers who devote a great deal of effort to optimizing sites so that they'll garner a high ranking. But in this column he's warning those same marketers that a drastic change in the worth or desirability of optimization may soon be upon them. And if such a change takes place, the information Google collects about me that at present seems insignificant may actually become the basis for a new, and more effective, search algorithm.

Go to: It's hardly worth it to them, or
Go to: Every cloud must have it's golden backing.