The Seductive Allure of the Chrome Browser’s Omnibox

Imagine a service, tailored to your personal tastes and needs, which helps you find the things you are looking for faster and better than anything else available.

Seductively easy to use, this service has the ability to create willing dependence while delivering exactly what you need at the moment.

Some people would pay big money for this type of service. The rest of us can get it from Google for (almost) free.

It’s called “personalized search” and the Chrome Browser’s Omnibox is another step in that direction.

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google talks about personalized search in her recent post on the Google Blog.

Especially interesting are her comments about the search results page transforming itself into something that feels more like an answer to you than the current “10 independent guesses” feel it has right now.

On thing about personalized search though, you have to give a little to get a lot in return. As Marissa explains, the search tool needs to watch, learn and make use of personal “signals” in order to provide this wonderfully transcendent search experience.

In sort of a high tech version of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, this means Google needs to know more about you.

Everything’s a trade off and the key for most people his how much privacy will this seductive new service cost them. Hopefully as little as possible.

You can read Marissa Mayer’s blog post here.