e.g. “Now, this is where the librarian comes into play. We are beginning to see the importance of a good social media reputation (that’s one of the reasons why Facebook and Google are so keen on the like/+1 concept). People generally trust librarians, which is a good thing. If librarians can get involved with authors much more closely (which the authors will be keen to do, as they already are), it should be possible to start choosing good ebooks and alerting people to them, talking to other librarians about them, using them in book clubs and so on. Expert librarians are going to be able to take on a much more powerful alerting/reviewing role in the future. This already works in bookshops, with ‘staff picks’ and ‘staff reviews’, so it should be at least as powerful, if not more so, when librarians get involved.”

See also this follow on post from Phil that relates more directly to this post: “Libraries as an influence on search results”
http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/04/libraries-as-an-influence-on-search-results.html

So for example: I get personalised search results from Google; Google uses however many ranking factors to personalise the order of the results; some of those ranking factors come from my social circle, in the form of signals relating to content my friends have either published or recommended.

Given that I use Google not the Library, talk to my twitter friends not go to the library, etc etc, if the library wants to have any influence at all over the search results I see, it has to do SEO on those results, on behalf of the publishers, so that I am more likely to see those results rather than any other results.

As to search personas – the idea is mainly this. My search results are personalised according to *my* search history, the searches I make, the links I click on, the sites I visit. It may be the case that my search engine personalisation makes my search results better than yours for a particular topic. (Okay, it might be that my search engine personalisation makes my search results better *for me* on a topic than if i saw your search results for the same topic (which may be better for you, but if we’re talking discovery around a research topic where we’re looking for some sort of “truth”, maybe there are saw universally useful results that my search engine is more likely to discover than yours because I’ve been searching in that area for years and you have only since last Thursday.) So, my search engine persona – that thing that Google knows about me and uses to personalise my search results – is useful. And it’s transferable… the Goog could copy that context to you; the Goog could let you search *as me* and benefit from my personalisations.

Here’s another way of trying to get a handle on it – suppose I’m an archivist with a highly effective indexing system that no-one else understands. I can get stuff out of the archive like no-one’s business, but it takes anyone else forever to do the same retrieval task. Part of the value of personalised search engines is that they are dependent on history; as such, they are in part *retrieval* engines. And one might imagine that sites visited and liked before also provide boosted Page Rank goodness to the calculation of results ranking for my future searches. There is also a history of search queries and search strategies I have used, and which can be referred to.

And another way: some academic researchers are very careful not to share bookmarks or reveal to others what they are reading, because they don’t want to give away any clues to their evil competitors (wtf is it about researchers being competitive ffs?!;-) about the leads they are following. They know their search history is valuable…

So the question is: if I train the Google in my role as “widget research librarian”, and run 50 searches a day on widgets for various members of my company, and train my personalised Google search engine all there is to know about widgets, and then I get a job offer with a rival company: who owns that expert search context, the one that has been being trained on widgets for the last 10 years?

So it boils down to this: I work in a job and optimise a process; do I get to take the process when I leave? The search context is the process. So do I own the search context (do I own the account I have been personalising through my searches for the last 10 years) and get to take it with me when I leave? Do i give it to the company? Or do I sign an agreement saying I won’t use that search context for 12 months as a non-competition restriction?

By the way, I don’t think search personalisation is necessarily that great yet, but as we keep on training these machines, the search contexts may become valuable.