by Gord Hotchkiss
http://www.enquiro.com

Google's announcement a little more than a week ago that they would be showing personalized search results to more people through a change in the sign in/sign out default signaled perhaps the most significant change in search marketing in the past few years. Fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz dealt with some of the SEO implications in his column on Tuesday. Today I'd like to deal more with the user side part of the story. Although Google's announcement represents a relatively minor change in terms of user experience, at least for the present time, it represents a step down a path from which there is no return, and this path marks a dramatically different direction for search that will have far reaching implications, both for advertisers and users.