Here we listed “12 Best Open-Source Social Networking Software To make Your Social Network Stronger Than Ever“.

http://technologytosoftware.com/best-open-source-social-networking-software-boost-social-network.html

2. Mugshot

1. Sourceforge

2. Mugshot

2. Mugshot

3. Elgg

4. Xoops with Yogurt extension

5. BuddyPress

6. Mahara

7. Kickapps

8. Insoshi

9. Lovd by Less

10. Anahita Social Engine

11. Mixxt

12. AROUNDMe

If you are using any other Social Networking Software to built a site than please share with us in comments.

                          

Introduction

First, lets use Zappos as an example on how to run an ecommrce SEO.
A quick intro to the search marketing landscape within Zappos.

In 2008, Zappos did over $1,000,000,000 in sales. In addition to strong customer loyalty and an increasingly strong brand, the company has a robust and sophisticated paid search program in place (led by Darrin Shamo).

While SEO has always been a part of the plan at Zappos, it’s become increasingly important over the last couple of years. During the early part of 2009, Zappos has been working on creating synergies between paid search and SEO – from developing a feedback loop on keyword data, to strengthening ROI by supporting high-cost terms with increased organic performance. There is a lot to be gained when the SEO team works closely with the PPC team, in any business.

What to Look for with Large Sites?

The most important issues when dealing with ecommerce sites (and for that matter, any large site), is really two-fold:

1. First, look for scale. What optimizations can be implemented which have the longest reach, and require the least amount of internal resources?

2. Secondly, look to leverage what’s there. Do you have several hundred thousand pages indexed in the search engines? Do you have several million backlinks? Taking advantage of these existing strengths should be a top priority.

A third point, which I’ll keep on its own, is to approach SEO with a user-centric point of view. A large ecommerce site is made up of a great many customers. These are not blank faces – empty people with full wallets – they are your company’s lifeblood and the advocates (or deterrents) of your brand. Additionally, keeping the focus on your users will pay rewards down the road in search marketing. What are links, for example, if not votes that search algorithms score? As Bob Massa precisely states,

“Search engines follow users.”

What are the Goals?

What exactly are the goals of SEO for ecommerce sites? Well, obviously sales! Revenue is the bottom line. But what tactics and strategies lead to sales? And what is the overall goal of those tactics and strategies? Briefly, the goal is SERP domination (relevant, user-centric domination of course).

At Zappos one of our aims is to populate search results with a diverse set of listings. The following screenshot shows an example with the query women’s shoes in Google:

There are 6 listings for Zappos and 6pm.com (a site owned by Zappos) above the fold, including product feeds from Google Base, paid, and organic listings.

What are the Main Factors?

On big sites it boils down to one thing: muscle. Large sites can attract a large amount of links, and can get large amounts of pages indexed in the engines. On-page SEO becomes paramount; it’s not about what others are doing so much. Acquiring backlinks matters less when you have a few million. With a lot of internal PageRank to push around, URLs, content and internal linking are the major factors at work. This is especially true as Google, for example, begins to reward brand strength with increased search visibility.

Here’s a screenshot with backlink info (and much more) from Aaron Wall’s essential SEO toolbar. If you’re not using it already, I highly recommend the install.

Once you have 6mil backlinks and nearly 1mil pages indexed, the game changes. There is more muscle to push around. In situations like this, ask youselves: what can we do that will have the biggest impact, with the smallest resource investment?

A few of the main criteria to look for include:

• • URLs:
  • Internal linking:
  • Content:
  • Internal linking:
  • Backlink acquisition:
  • Internal linking

Search engines like pretty, user-friendly URLs without excessive duplication (one URL per page please). They improve the experience in search results, they add context and relevance, and make the search engines a better place to search. Keywords in domain names trump pretty much everything (but not sub-domains anymore, so much).

Internal linking isn’t just about spiders, of course, but it sure helps them get around. A good information architecture should be the foundation of any ecommerce site. Above and beyond that, related product and category links (relevant, targeted, and limited in quantity) are very effective for users and SEO.

Everyone knows people want content. Because people want content, search engines want it too. Therefore, make content that people want to read, and share, and tweet, and bookmark, and make it easy for bots to find.

It’s important! So I listed it again.

As was already pointed out, backlinks become less of a dependence issue as they grow in quantity. Where backlinks continue to be important, however, is when a company wishes to branch out and extend their brand into new product or category verticals.

Yup, listed it again. It’s that important.

SEO isn’t Only About SEO

You read that right – SEO isn’t just about search engine optimization. It’s also (dare I say mostly) about people. Getting buy-in on projects can be very difficult in a large organization, where development resources are spread thin. What’s the solution? Create projects that aren’t about SEO, but have valuable search benefits. Projects that build on interesting or creative ideas, but also have SEO value baked in, can be very effective for taking shortcuts around typical company ’sell and deploy’ time cycles.

Using language beyond just “getting some links” or “encouraging crawling”(things we care a lot about as SEOs) gives you more credibility and implies a wider potential impact that other teams will appreciate. It’s also easier to push a project from idea to implementation. By making it less about SEO and more about the site’s visitors, and by providing enough inherent value that it will spread well on its own (or at least have a good chance), we can shortcut SEO into particular lifecycles of the company.

Why is this a good thing? In short, user-centric projects:

• Are sometimes easier to get buy-in
• Take the focus off SEO for essential departments like dev and UX
• Keep the focus on providing value (the end goal, right?)

The Big Picture

Aside from the benefits and challenges in working with large ecommerce sites, there are political factors at work. Bottom line: you have to know where your place is in the overall processes of a large organization. SEO isn’t everything, and your team is just another team with their own particular needs, goals, and priorities.

Resources are a constant hindrance to success in SEO at any large company. The dev team is already taxed and limited with time, and the last thing they want to hear about is your SEO needs. There are also difficulties getting SEO ‘believed in’ among development and UX teams (and if they’re anything like Zappos, they’re going to be incredibly bright and sharp folks). They code the sites, create the user experience, and we’re the consultants recommending tweaks and fixes (as well as new initiatives). I’ve found the best way to fit into such a professional hierarchy is with sincere respect, and a knowledge of my own place in the picture.

At the end of the day, we are all working towards the same thing: growing revenues. It’s not about you, it’s about the company’s bottom line. Put your ego aside, provide value, and make it happen!

                          

Social media has become an essential part of any digital marketing initiative. Companies are discovering the importance of having a vital reputation and social presence online.

As more and more social outlets appear online, it is of imperative importance to have a well-designed social media plan that includes a follow-up phase. Part of that plan is to put in place a tracking mechanism to measure your social media effectiveness and success.

Here are five tools for measuring and and tracking your company’s social impact.

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.1.Socialmention – Social Media Analytics  Tool

Social Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis tool. The system displays information where your name has been mentioned in variety of social outlets. It provides graphical information about the strength ratio of mentions of specific brand being discussed in the social media sphere, the sentiment rating of positive or negative mentions, the passion of individuals repeatedly talking about your brand, and the reach, which measures the range of influence authors mentioning your brand. Along with very in-depth information of the more often used keywords, top users, top Hashtags, and the sources.

HOW IT WORKS: Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.

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2. Backtype.com – Social Impact Monitoring Tool

Other good Social analytics tool is backtype.com. A platform that helps companies understand their social impact.

HOW IT WORKS: Type the  URL, or blog site, and the system will display  a graph similar to Google analytics with monthly engagement statistics of comments done on blogs, dig, friendfeed, reddit  and tweets related to the domain name, audience analysis and conversion analysis. Additionally, it provides competitor comparison against any other website like yours.

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3. Radian6 – Social Media Monitoring Tool

Ridian6 is a popular social media monitoring tool that helps you track quite a lot of signals and get insights into your brands performance on various social media channels. They cover almost all the social media channels like blogs, twitter and facebook. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts, perfect for that presentation you want to pull off.

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4. Alterian Social Media Monitoring

Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool is one that gives advanced user behavior statistics, measures and analyze daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product. A little too much details but a good tool nevertheless. This one too, covers a range of social media channels like digg/linkedin/facebook/twitter/delicious etc.

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5. ScoutLabs Web based Social Media Monitoring Tool

An eye candy this one. Scout Labs social media monitoring tool is web based, and with an interface like Google Analytics it tracks almost all the online social media channels. It measures all the negative/positive signals and gives you reports based on the overall performaces.

Go try it out, and have fun!

                          

By Mary,

Recently, Google explained to digital marketers that links coming from social media like macroblogging, digg, youtube, facebook, etc., count as an important factor for website ranking.

Google describes how links that come naturally from viral word of mouth, on the basis of the merit (people linking to a website because they genuinely like it), are more valuable, opposed to inbound links coming from “link building marketing” efforts which build links in a none organic way.

Google explains they’ve been monitoring this closely and is taking in consideration those links that have been attracted on their on…on the basics of the interestingness of a website. Of course, this comes as surprised to many SEO professionals, specially link builders, but this is part of the new algorithms changes Google implemented recently.

Links that are editorially base and come naturally are better than those typical link-building tactics because you won’t have to work for them nearly as hard. Plus, Google will consider these vital links as high valuable traffic, leaving the none organic ones below value rate.

Does this mean link building is going to disappear?

It looks to me more like link building is evolving towards a more natural way, where the online user has the upper hand, and not the link builder guy. Google recently explained they consider inbound links coming from pages to be only one out of their 200 factors, so they have asked people to relax with the link building frenzy and concentrate more on generating interesting and unique content for their users. Of course, they do not discard adding those on-page keyword elements to make sense of what a website is about.

Some example of vital linking:

• Links from video sites, and microbiologist sites
• Links from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
  

• VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:
• Social channels like youtube or facebook need to generate comments and attract views and generate quality of followers and quantity of      followers ratio.
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity)
• Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not prefer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places like. photobucket.com
• Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and work (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital ad marketing campaign all together.
  
  
  
• MICRO BLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness of and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet.

Yes! times are changing. Many of those Google changes happened at the end of last year, including Personalized Search, and most recently last May. Google is moving towards semantic web technology and real-time SEO, and common SEO practices are becoming obsolete. One of them is Link building practices who a lot of companies still use as their main SEO strategy. SEO professionals need to keep in mind that it is not about jumping into social media as the only new best way to link/rank a site– it is more about gearing the focus towards Semantic Web as a whole. Read more about Semantic web.

                          

Having a video showing up on Google organic is not the result of  the usual application of SEO strategies. This is because a video on Google organic comes from a well coordinated plan of  SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (vital marketing) strategies.

This is call SMM (Social Media Marketing), Not SEO. Video Marketing is a whole different ball game. Very often, Search optimization can’t  rank a video on Google organic as well as it  does with other regular content pages. This is because Google’s video ranking factors come mostly from social activities.

Some example of factors:

• Linking video from other socia/video sites.
• Link video from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
• authority and constant activity.

VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:

• First and most important, you need to create a video site map. Creating a video site map is easy. Here are the five things you need to include in the site map:
  x
  1) Title
  2) Description
  3) Play page URL
  4) Thumbnail image URL

  Once you’ve collected this information, sign into Google webmaster tool and submit your video site map.x
  

• If the video is hosted in your site, make sure you include keyword information about it, in your page title, name of the video, or text around the video.
  One tip: I would recommend introducing a place for people to leave comments. This will generate more natural keywords from users commenting about the video.
  x
• Those videos need to generate comments and attract views and generate quiality of followers and quantity of followers.
  x
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity).
  x
  Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not preffer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places.

• Free places to distribute online videos:
  • YouTube.com
  • twitvid.com (for twitter)
  • bubbletweet.com (cool vid for twitter like and websites)
  • Vimeo.com
  • 12seconds.tv
  • Zipvo.com
  • Homeumentary.com
  • Tweetube.com
  • Twitvid.com
  • TwitCam
  • Twiddeo.com
  • RealeFlix.com
  • Realestateshot.com
  • TweetReel (for iPhone)
  • Blip.tv
  • Facebook.com
  • Myspace.com

• MICROBLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• Again, introducing functionalities where viewers can leave comments about your videos will generate natural keywords and relevant content from users, which Google semantic search is now ranking as important factor.
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet–with video links.

KEYWORD FACTORS

These are the key parts where you should focus:

• Include keywords in your video name, titles & description.
• Build a video library to make your channel more relevant
• Activate comments, rates, favorites through your channel
• Add a link to your website within the description

Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and effort (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital marketing campaign all together, but should be part of your overall online marketing plan.

Create a channel with multiple videos

NOTE TO KEEP IN MIND: Even though youtube or Google doesn’t look at video quality to rank videos, a good produced  and interesting video is required to generate the social media traffic that subsequently will help your video rank high.  I have studied video production in the past, and I will soon write a post about how to produce a good quality video for the web. In the mid-time, you can check out Media Trust Blog post  Crash Course in Creating Compelling Product Videos as an starting point.

Related news and articles:

• Small Business Social Media Marketing eBook (slideshare.net)
• Using Facebook for SEO and Driving Traffic (shawndrewry.com)
• Social Media Optimization: SMO is the New SEO – Part 2 (briansolis.com)
• Can You Keep Ignoring Social Media? 10 Reasons Why You Just Can’t (blonde2dot0.com)
• What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)? (antonrsa.co.za)

                          

By Mary,
Twitter is a great microbloging platform, but what they’ve neglected in focusing on is that by producing things in real time there are stuff that gets left behind with volumes of information you cannot make heads of tails out of it.

Each tweets has relevance in a the longer term fashion, and it has even more relevance if it could be assembled into an organized by topic durable content. Fortunately, there is new plataform that allow us to do just that. It’s called Twylah.

Twylah organizes your Twitter stream (lists and all) into neatly organized topical folders, and crates your very own blog out of your tweets, creating a durable contextual SEO-optimized pages. You can even tweet from within your blog.

A blog more sustainable with more durable stratigic valuable goods, turning flow into stock, boosting productivity, and organizing your tweets as long-term ranking influencers.

HOW TO GET IT

All you  need to do is go to Twylah.com. It will ask you to join by using your tweeter account login. Give a minute, and voila! you have a blog organized with tabs pert topic.

Check out my new Twylah page

Have fun creating your own!

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Phrase of the day: HIGH QUALITY INFLUENCERS.

                          

I had the pleasure of meeting Tim Ash a couple of years ago at one of the Ad-tech events in New York city, and ever since we’ve bumped into each other from time to time. Always a pleasure to talk  to him, share ideas and experiences, and get free books from him (joke)–very nice guy.

Well, I want to share with you yet another of Tim’s work. Today’s Tim webminar on Landing Page was commented by tweeters as “a great webminar!” He was very kind to share it with us, so here it is. Enjoy it!

                          

By Mary,

What semantic means? is the study of meaning in communication.

So then what is Semantic Search?

Semantic Web, part of the new 3.0 technology is being used by the engines. Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.

This was not a big factor on Google, but all that has changed. Semantic Search is now at the core of its search engine technology.

Semantic technology is a human-software architecture that identify associations and concepts related to a query. It allows the robots to read keywords but also the similarity between them and the links within a site to make sense of what a page is about.

Another way to picture this is to use a cube where all these factors need to be moved around and compose a perfect six-sided match. It’s the same way with semantic search. The bot engine comes to a site and does not longer looks at one side of your page, it reads throughout the entire site meaning, by observing closely at the composition of the contextual elements to determine where the site stands as a whole. For instance, if you search for “web design” a semantic search engine might retrieve documents containing the words “HTML”, “Dreamweaver” and “video training”, even if the word “web design” is not found in the source document.

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A semantic search engine automatically identifies the concepts structuring the text content.

“For example, if you search for ‘principles of physics’, our algorithms understand that ‘angular momentum,’ ’special relativity,’ ‘big bang’ and ‘quantum mechanic’ are related terms that could help you find what you need,” wrote Ori Allon, technical lead of Google’s Search Quality team, and Ken Wilder, team engineer at the company’s Snippets project on their blog.

In January of this year, during Google’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call, CEO Eric Schmidt touched briefly on this topic, hinting that the company is getting more serious about semantic search technology. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase, rather than just the words that are in the phrase? We have [done] a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out [soon],” Schmidt said.

Microsoft is the workings as well. Last year they acquired Powerset, one of the companies developing and perfecting semantic search engines, in order to improve its Web search engine with semantic search technology.

And most recently, since july 19th, 2010 Metaweb is now part of Google, so very soon Google will have tools for webmasters to plug their sites into Entities.

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What are Entities?

Is a singular person, place or thing. For example, One thing could be named different ways or vise-versa, one word could mean many things.  So by using the process of identifying millions of identities and what other sites use to relate to them, Metaweb (now Google) builds a map of single words into entities to show how they are related.

Entities are smarter than words. “It’s a collaborated process that involves the online community.” Metaweb explains on their blog. Wait, “community?” Does this sounds like Google is tryign to put SEO out of business? You will be the judge of that. Watch this video explaining the entire process.

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Where does this leaves current SEOs tactics?

For now, lets think of search engines as a 5 year old child, and try to talk to it in terms it will understand. So keywords are still a key on-page element. For example, it’s good to do your keyword research and use those keywords into your pages, but additionally try to use variations of SYNONYMS of the same keyword.

Other Recomendations

-Use independent “topics” instead of terms!

- Use close variants. This would include, singular/plural forms, misspellings, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) are not considered close variants.

The illustration below outlines the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As it shows, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

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IMPORTANT: Keywords that have become more important than title tag (believe it or not).

-Use Keywords that trigger action or interaction with the user and/or provides the user with something valuable. Like using the following keywords: “for example,” an example of this,” “an study conducted by,” ” here is a demo,” “comment on this” (this would be for blogs), “read white paper,” “Join,”  ”poll(s),”  ”news,’ “related articles,” “follow us,” “case study.” and so on.

If you’ve noticed, some of these keywords are the description of tools that creates on-the-fly elements, otherwise called, real-time SEO [Read more about real-time SEO.] Google is reading into these real-time content generators as important factors, even more than title tags.

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For web development

Buildings sites based on entities, which is a matter of plug-in in your site to an entity data base. (tool will soon be available on Google webmaster tools).

It’s suggested to begin using blogs  instead of regular sites. For example, Wordpress can run a site just as good as any other regular website technology, and the upside is that Google is ranking sites with social factors and freshness in them. Blogs are a perfect fit for that. A blog can be designed and developed to look like a  full-blown website, with the advantage of all the widgets you can add to it.

A case study on this is a recent multiple local listing I did for a client, we set up a blog specifically to rank for one of his offices in Florida. I themed about 20% with related (not relevant–how about that) local mentions and close variant keywords. In less than two days, we were ranking in third position on Google organic. In the other hand, It took about about two weeks to show up on Google maps. What this means is that the blog was faster on ranking than the submission we did to Google maps.

Another option is to use SCRM. CRM (customer relationship management) is actually evolving to SCRM (Social CRM). More than a tool, Social CRM is a shift we are seeing in behavioral and interaction based not technology driven.  We can see from the diagram below what this evolution means to both the company and the customer. It could be confusing for some web developers to understand that applying social elements and using CRM systems is not longer a one way street task anymore. Websites now at days need to be adapt to serve the demand for the new generation of social customers/users.

Lean LSA modeling method

“Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text.” Explains U.C.

It is essential that you understand the LSA modeling methods before using semantic applications on a website. A good way to start learning LSA is by checking the study conducted by the University of Colorado on LSA.

Apply the SVD to a term–document matrix

-  The intermediate dimensions correspond to “topics”

– Terms that usually occur together get bundled (synonyms)

– Terms having several meanings get assigned to several topics (polysemes)

What do we need?

– How to relate single terms to topics

– How to relate documents to topics

– How to relate query terms to topics

Note: It’s good to remember that LSI is only one of many types of NLP.

Again, providing valuable and relevant content but mixed with new semantic tactics. This is the new SEO.

Read this article on how Google Explains Social Links Are Better Than Link Building. One of the many factors semantic has changed the web for good.

Related news and articles:

• How Twitter Annotations Could Bring the Real-Time and Semantic Web Together (readwriteweb.com)
• Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing

More about the term Semantic Search

______________________________________________________________________________

Semantic search

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Author Seth Grimes lists “11 approaches that join semantics to search”[1], and Hildebrand et al. [2] provide an overview that lists semantic search systems and identifies other uses of semantics in the search process.

Guha et al.[3] distinguish two major forms of search: Navigational and Research. In navigational search, the user is using the search engine as a navigation tool to navigate to a particular intended document. Semantic Search is not applicable to navigational searches. In Research Search, the user provides the search engine with a phrase which is intended to denote an object about which the user is trying to gather/research information. There is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. Semantic Search lends itself well here.

Rather than using ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.

Other authors primarily regard semantic search as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies as found on the Semantic Web [4]. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time.

                          

Google released their “permanent” personalization of results just at the end of last year, and Bing released their own the following week. Check SearchEngineLand’s coverage, though one big question remains in my mind:

What metrics impact personalization?

Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads – either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick?

I’d love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they’re dealing with. If it’s proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new “paid inclusion” for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn “organic” positioning as well.

Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the game, IMO:

• The Rich Get Richer - It’s now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you’re going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before.
• Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We’ll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this.
• There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there’s no “normal” ranking that’s “average” in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the “personalization” battle, and you may start to care less about the classic “rankings” battle.

SIDE NOTE: Here is instructions about turning off personalization

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048hl=en&answer=54048

I tested out, and quite honestly, the search results still seem affected and not as good as before. It gathers random results– all related to a theme of words–but not much related to my query in particular.