Why YouTube and Google Personalize Search Results
Many people believe that search results in Google and YouTube are the same for everyone, and though they might be similar, they are rarely 100 percent the same.
Why does this phenomenon occur?
Google and YouTube both have personalization for search results based on factors like your location, search history, and some experimentation to determine what content performs best.
We’ll look at both Google and YouTube to see how personalization affects search results, and why your friends might see different results than you do.
Google Personalization in Search Results
The primary way that Google personalizes search results is in the 3-pack map for local search results. The main factor that Google prioritizes is proximity, or your distance from target businesses.
Think of Google Maps as a travel planning app, and it will make sense. Google Maps will give you the businesses closest to you when you make a local search. Those results are plugged into the place where the map goes on your search results page.
In local SEO, other factors can also help push certain results in Google Maps, as businesses with lots of Google reviews and reviews from other platforms can help rankings. The content on your website should also match the target search terms, and this applies to both Google Maps and normal search results.
The normal search results, minus the Google Maps results, can be affected by how you are searching for a given service. Though the search results may be very similar if you search with similar phrases, some differences might show up in the ranking order.
There can be some personalization with the search results if you have visited a site before. Though this seems to be less of a factor than it was in years past, if you have found results from a website helpful before, that site might be ranked a little higher in search results.
One other factor that is seldom mentioned is that Google does use machine learning to determine the overall rankings for search terms over time. So this variation in rankings can occur in small amounts randomly, to test certain results. Google can push certain results higher for a time to see how they perform versus other results. This allows the machine learning part of the algorithm, RankBrain, to test different results. To whatever degree user signals are used in the ranking algorithm, Google can gather user data using this personalization.
YouTube Personalization
The personalization dial on YouTube results is cranked up to 100 on your home page. The videos you see when you first log in are going to be based primarily on your recent viewing history. YouTube will also resurface old videos you have watched before, videos you have added to your Watch Later playlist, and videos related to ones you have liked or engaged with in the distant past.
Regarding search results in YouTube, these are also going to be based on personalization in your YouTube account. The ranking of videos for a given search may be similar, but thy won’t be exactly the same for every person. Videos in YouTube search may be personalized based on what accounts you follow and your viewing history.
Channels to which you are subscribed, or with which you have engaged (thumbs up, long watch time) may appear higher when you are doing a particular search.
Reasons for Personalization in Search Results
YouTube and Google both want you to keep using their platforms so they can have a larger advertising base, and therefore more revenue. This is the underlying reason for all of their decisions regarding ranking algorithms.
The better search results on Google, the more people use it, the more businesses will use Google Ads. On YouTube, the number one metric they measure is how long each session is, or how much you use the platform. If they keep surfacing videos you like, the more pre-roll and mid-video ads you will see, and the more revenue they will earn. That’s the main objective.
So, they search results on both platforms need to be better than any alternatives. Personalization is used extensively on YouTube to give each user a unique experience made specifically for their tastes. Google uses personalization to serve up search results that are most helpful to a given user, and also to do a small amount of experimentation through machine learning to figure out the best overall results for a larger audience.
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