As I have mentioned before, I could understand and even encourage Google to somehow decide to pull in my most recent blog posts as part of their real time search. Most people searching for me it is most likely a regular reader doing a navigational query looking for my latest blog posts, not my latest tweets.

I see this with both a UK and US search, personalization switched off in the query, and logged out

http://www.google.com/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=US
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=andy+beard&pws=0&gl=UK

This is an “Anytime” search – no need to select “latest”

Update – Chris Brogan Too

I wonder where Chris would prefer the traffic to go, blog or Twitter?

I can’t track search traffic to Twitter

The Most Personal Searches

Whilst I was tempted to demonstrate this with a specific piece of content, there are too many other known or unknown factors involved.

In the end the best demonstration of this strange phenomena, some might look on it as a bug, was perhaps the most personal of all searches, and ego search.

Ego Search For Andy

Lots of bloggers know that Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) outranks Matt Harding (the Dancer) & Matt Cutts (Google) for a search for Matt.

That order has changed fairly recently, because Matt the Dancer is topical

Unfortunately for me, even Andy which is an abbreviated form of Andrew has almost as many results in Google as Matt, and of course there is also a WordPress developer called Andy Skelton.

Then of course there are all the “notable” Andy’s who have a Wikipedia page dedicated to them.

I also read a lot of blogs written by people called Andy, and I have visited a few other sites from searching for Andy in the past.

Personalized Search Results For Andy

Google now state in the search results window that you are looking at Personalized Search Results. I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but I haven’t been reading quite as many feeds for the last few weeks as normal.

16th for a personalized search for Andy – – I don’t mind being listed slightly further down the page than my very notable colleagues, at least for now.

Then I noticed the text about this being a personalized result, and thought it would be a good idea to test this without personalized results switched on.

Normal Search Results For Andy

This could be datacenter related – I am gaining in ranking for ego searches at a reasonable rate, and personalized search could use a newer or older dataset compared to the main index.

I believe since I first started using personalized search I have clicked through on more search results containing the word “andy” to my own site than I have clicked through to Andy Beal or Andy Hagans.
I also spend a lot more time on my own site, and click through on general results to my own site more than I have to Andy Beal or Andy Hagans.

Why do I rank higher for “Andy” in the non-personalized results? (13th place)

p.s. I noted that Andy Skelton for some reason now has both his blogs set to noindex nofollow though it is still showing in the main Google index, but not the personal results. Matt Harding’s blog on typepad is also showing noindex, nofollow