Over the last few weeks of 2008 there was a lot of talk about drastic changes to Google’s ranking algorithms that would come in early 2009. At PubCon 2008 in November Bruce Clay proclaimed that “ranking is dead” in a much-discussed session. Here’s a video of Mike MacDonald from WebProNews interviewing Bruce about his presentation.
To recap briefly, Bruce bases his claim that “ranking is dead” on the observation of increasingly personalized and localized search results and the prediction that Google will move to return personlized search results even when users aren’t logged in to their Google accounts. If this is true, and to a large extent it already is, no two people will see the same results for a given keyword.
