A patent filed a few days ago by Google may tell us a little more about what Google has been doing recently. A large part of patent seems to involve data collected by searchers.

Data Collected:

The language of the user

The phrases or keywords used in their queries

Query history – for example, someone may search for a term frequently, while many others may search less frequently

The location of the surfer – Here is an interesting tool where you can see how different searches yield different results based on the location.

Creation of Profiles:

With the above information, Google can then build profiles for what different surfers will be likely to want to see in their search results. Because so many of googles users are logged in now, Google can determine some information about the user’s profile, and then serve information based on things like their location, languages or past searches. Even if the user is not logged in, Google still knows things like the IP address of the surfer, the language they are using, and their location. So even without “personalized” results, google appears to be serving different results based on criteria they know about the surfer, as well as surfers in their language, or even the query history of other surfers who made similar requests.

What can we do with this information?

First of all, building niche directories and local directories plays goes along VERY well with the new algorithm. Using the search tool provided by google you can start to see what users in YOUR area or niche are most looking for and you can build a site that is more pleasing to the people you server or plan to serve.

It will become increasingly important to look at your Google Analytics data to build a profile of the people you are currently serving. In Google Analytics, look at

Visitors > Map Overlay

Visitors > Languages

Then go back to this tool and see what types of information and sites users would be looking for the most for some of the key phrases that are important to your site. Then build a site around this.

What you may also find is that you are missing some search traffic because your site is not reflective of what people want in certain areas. You may even be able to have an impact on small segments of the population, so that you can dominate the SERPS for that area.

There is an interesting story about how the first legal brothel in the United States was formed (research the history of the Mustang Ranch if this interests you). The brothel was in a county with a very small population, and the owner of the brothel built a trailer park adjacent to the brothel. Since the county had only about 1000 people, it was very easy to sway the vote enough to get the bill passed.

Now what we are doing on Google is probably much more ethical than legalizing a brothel! But we can learn a lot about creating a following in:

Specific Areas

Specific Niches

Specific Languages

Then we can be assured that we get traffic from certain groups, and then grow our business by repeating this over and over. As a result of this article, you never know, we may start to dominate the SERPs for people who live in a trailer park, speak English and have an interest in Brothels or Patents. Just kidding!

But seriously, now is the time to find out who is visiting your site and making sure you are building a site they would want to surf. Moreover, now is the time to look for areas where you can build a business around. It might be a fun experiment to see if you could influence the SERPs in a small town.

Best Wishes!