Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it's hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn't see anything like 2007's Pontiac advertisement:
At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here's why:
Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google's results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn't just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.
I'm not sure when we'll start to see this strategy employed, but it can't be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for SEO.
We've had great results emailing customers, newsletter subscribers and feed subscribers directions to search for our site(s) in the SERPs to find the secret 20% discount (with explicit instructions of course).
I've seen banner ads issuing instructions to perform a unique search too ;)
Then knowing that search is now personalized to unauthenticated users by IP address I should make my site very popular to my IP address and then clone my IP address to the Cisco Router that is the gateway for a country and then BAM top rankings in China. Brilliant (smacks head) MUhahahaha.
LOL! You've missed your calling. You'd have made a great evil scientist.
It does seem like it has potential. I've visited https://www.hockeydb.com (title = The Internet Hockey Database -- Hockey Statistics, Data, Logos..) a bunch of times for hockey statistics, usually searching player name + hockeydb. Now, hockeydb.com is showing up as #2 for a search on "hockey", #4 for Internet, #3 for statistics, #1 for data , although it doesn't appear to rank for logos.
makes sense, but what happens if they Google you and you are not in control of #1 & #2 as seems to happen more often.
the other small problem if they click a competitors adwords ad, they are not biased to your competitors on future questions ;)
Great analysis and nice read Rand. Thanks :)
so this personalised search thing makes offline advertising more important for large companies, when done properly.
offline advertising should now contain the strapline: "search for COMPANYXYZ.com" instead of the domain name.
This will induce searchers to search for your brand, and click on it, thus inducing this searcher affinity with your brand.
cheeky, but it works!
MOGmartin
It's a scary move, and I don't like it at all.
Personally, I'm going to turn that feature "off".
Ive got it turned off as well, but the thing is, its that well hidden on page (its not an obvious link) 99.9% of regular surfers wont turn it off.
Yeah, it was really difficult to find. I cannot believe Google would make it so hard to disable...but then again, I can.
they've really gone down the whole "hide it in plain view" sticking it where they did ;-)
I had to google it first time I realised it was on, to see how to disable it - unless you had a professional interest, you probably wouldnt bother.
This move certainly makes social media marketing more important than ever - as we are geared towards building the brand name... and not just exhausting efforts in targeting keyword phrases.
U r rite.
personalized search bother me... I do lots of searches for stuff (to see how its doing) and now the results are messed up :( my buddy called me the other day to congratulate me for getting "it support". while we did rank #1 for "it support houston" for awhile I knew this was a case of personal search. I had him turn off web history and log out of his Google account and boom we were back off the first page. i really dont like this idea because it kinda promotes the rich get richer idea and i cant be sure anything is ranking as high as i think it is because my search history could be affecting it. i wonder where the webmaster tools position numbers come from... is that im no 1 for some random dude or across the board?
Hi Neopunisher,
I had actually wondered about the Webmaster positions as well and I believe its not set on personalized search because I checked and it was rating quite differently when I logged into my account as opposed to what I saw on the Webmaster tool.
Yes, not maybe SEO experts may love personalized search (myself included) but like Rand has said, there are ways to go about it, like this Viral Marketing. When life gives you lemons...
Agreed. Not only does it promote a rich-get-richer scenario, it leads to much less diversity in search results. It really makes it harder for the little guy to scratch and claw his way to the top.
The little guy having a shot used to be one of the great things about the net in general and SEO in particular. Now it seems like this is going away too.
You also get a situation where the only way a new site can legally get found is by ppc, which then pushes up ppc costs for popular keywords. Mmmm, I wonder who gains most from that? Not Google by any chance?
Sort of makes you question Google's mantra of "Dont be evil"...
its not evil or good, its just the natural balance of this system. Yes google makes money from this arrangement, but so too do the MEGA sites that are hoovering up the results.
What are the serps going to be like when theres more than 1 wikipedia? We saw in the last WBF that NYtimes is seriously competing for organic results. They could be the next Wikipedia
It only takes 5 huge domains to dominate a lot of worthwhile organic search (by traffic volume)
= no luck for you and me except to scrabble round the edges on the mythical long tail.
There are Z valuable keywords and the number of good spots is Zx10. WHen Z is taken up by large sites reaching further and further into the long tail looking for revenue, we end up almost back at mega portal sites (which wikipedia is pretty much)
So the question is really, what comes after Google?
Hey Rand. Couldn't agree with you more re: the opportunity the Super Bowl ads have for creating massive spikes of branded search.
But before you employ the strategy, you'd better be sure you'll be in the top SERP's. Take for example the Tim Tebow ad.
It was a simple message, so simple that I didn't understand it, so even though the end text said "for the full Tim Tebow story go to focusonthefamily.org" I just googled "Focus on the Family Tim Tebow". The website wasn't even in the top 50 results!
So to reiterate, before employing the strategy, I'd make absolutely certain that I had the pieces in place to ensure my top ranking.
Nice article Rand..
Well you can also conclude, how important Google has made its advertisement model here.
Consider a company who runs a PPC campaign of its products / services and a user clicks on the ad. Next time when user registers a same query on Google search, user will get the previously clicked results higher in the SERPs due to personalisation of results...
Well this is what I think (may be I am wrong).
Your comments are awaited.
Cheers
SK
Hi Skhosla,
I don't want to believe personalized search would be inflenced by Google Ads. I think it would be highly un-User experience friendly, which I believe Google is trying to achieve.
But then again, I might be wrong...
Hi SK
The paid search model and natural search model are completely different, they use diffent ranking algorithms, and Google can easily differentiate the clicks between two areas.
Imo, it's very unlikely that Google will count clicks on paid search results into algorithm to influence natural personalised search.
The key that Google retains users is to provide best search quality, so visitors keep using Google service and then have chance to click on advertisement.
Good post but to me if your landing page is not relevant for a given query don't use this approach.
Anyaway, to me Google will bring some changes on personnal search if Bing or Yahoo for example provide more relevants results
Your landing page comment is right on target seyah25. But then I'm of the opinion that sites should be vetted and optimised regularly to properly convert the traffic (organic as well as PPC)that comes in to the heaviest used pages.
And I think you're spot on regarding the Bing/Yahoo comment. If Google continues to muddy up my search results with local results/real time results/"other businesses I might be interested in"/etc. I may start using Bing more and more just to get cleaner results without the Google bling.
I disagree.
I wouldn't use this as a marketing strategy unless there was significant money on the table.
Given Google's massive search market share in the US and Europe, between 60 - 90% of the people would perform their search on Google (when invited to to "search for"...) without branded bias.
Given the huge amount of ad dollars in the online display market, (particularly in auto sectors) that goes to Yahoo! MSN and AOL, such a move could surely rock the boat and be difficult to sign-off.
Finally, although you might be confident about owning your organic SERP, competitors are free to bid on your brand term. If a competitor ad catches the eye, I'd imagine that would inform the behaviour for future related searches and have a negative or neutral effect for the brand in future searches.
Would the additional search and personalisation effect be worth it? As the return is quite difficult to quantify, I wouldn't take this risk.
Loving the second image!
I think im gonna save it and change the text to suit depending on the next question my clients ask
Something similar has been happening in the orld of PPC for a long time. User behaviour effects future results.
We then saw it when people were logged in to there Google accounts.
Now it is happening just based on a user revisiting google with the same browser.
It will become very very important in the long run but for most people (those without superbowl budgets) the principle remains the same. SEO will result in more exposure and this exposure will in turn lead to more traffic.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes!
"At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move."
Purely from a usability perspective I think it makes perfect sense :)
OK, not to much for Pontiac, but it would be especially useful for domains that contain hyphens or common mispellings. You can always count on Google sorting mispellings or typos.
I think it makes more sense in a market like the UK however, where Google is even more dominent and half the companies out there use .com and most of the others use .co.uk domains. People might recall the incorrect one.
well what i am taking the personalized search is like that if i am working at some clients site so i visit it again and again..n google will show it in high rank at my desk, is it so? n what i understand so far is that it will work whether you are loged in google account or not, it dsnt matter.. may b i am wrong as i am new to seo.. so help me.. thankx in advance
Rand, I never fully understood the purpose of the Pontiac/Google ad back then - why did they want to send anyone to Google first? Perhaps it was just a test run with TV ads on Google's part and maybe the people behind the Pontiac brand thought it was important to do it at the time. Back on topic...today with PSR (personalized search results -- wait, did I just coin a new acronym?) being all the rage, this seems like it could get out of hand and turn into a nightmare for Google and businesses/publishers/advertisers on many levels, whether it's done through TV or internet ads. It appears to be a simple marketing technique but could easily wind up being viewed as a light-black top hat tactic (LBTHT), in the near future -- all due to the "need" for PSR.
first time post here, frequent reader of your work. I think this was a tremendous article, and it speaks to the future of e-marketing IMO. With personal search results making ranking impossible to predict (eventually?), marketers must be conscious of the specific message they project, down to the keyword level.
There are several examples I can think of where this is happening. Allstate Insurance: Where did the term "accident forgivness" come from? I'm not in the industry, but I can tell you it would be much easier to optimize then other high traffic terms. Commercial lures people to search, then bammmm! they find Allstate.
Its a sneaky tactic...
This is amazing and bought a lightbulb to my head - exactly what MOGmartin said. Making somebody search for your site in Google is going to be as valuable as listing your domain name.
I'm glad you posted this. It's gotten me a little excited. I can have a play around with personalised results now, something that is starting to have an effect on many people...
I'll have to bring this up in future meetings too... could potentially be of great use.
Nice work Rand! I would like to point out that Google did do a Social Media push on #Brandbowl after the Google Ad aired. It pushed the Brand Bowl raters to Google YouTube page which explained the origination of that particular video and framed it within a larger context (since it was not a new video & had been released for a while).
Still your points are well taken. Warmly, Jeris
but what happened when we google over personalises?
If everything becomes very biased then the functionality of search will not work? will it?
I don't think personalized search will weigh heavy enough into the algo to drastically change search results. I think variances of a few spots.
To be honest it's unlikely as it's only going to affect certain areas. The way Pontiac have done this is clever but how often will people search for "Pontiac" or "Cars"?
The results that are personalised will be ones that have been searched for before, a lot of the time people bookmark this and just go there anyway; using Google to find things that they don't know about, therefore won't be personalised. That's my 2 cents anyway.
Heard Rand talk about this last month at AZIMA (in AZ) and low and behold...you were right on the the money. Guess you DO know what you're talking about after all! ;o)
Some potential downsides I see here are that one, marketing departments are going to have squabbles over whether this is best for getting people to a site as quickly as possible, and two, this could cause more structured negative reputation management attempts as people compete for each other's brand names.
So long as both the URL of the site and a Google suggestion appear somewhere in the ad, of course, it's feasible that SEO teams will try this.
It's escaping me which company was responsible now, but there was quite an amusing "Google [xyz]" misadventure in the UK a few years ago when a company (it may have been Orange?) encouraged people to "search for [um I can't remember] in Google"... when they didn't rank for [yeah] at all. Oops. I guess the first rule of offline-meets-online is that offline has to have at least a basic understanding of online.
Any other UK SEOs, with better memories, remember who was responsible for that blunder?
Aha, yeah it was Orange. The campaign was based around the ambiguous phrase "I am who I am because of everyone", where visitors were encouraged to search for 'I am'. Naturally they didn't rank for it and they were reliant on the PPC ad getting the most clicks.
Excellent tips! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Rand,
Never thought of this before. Your offline marketing campaigns supports you SEO campaigns. Try to increase the total amount of search queries on your brand to increase the authority of your website in Search Engines.
Rand,
Great analysis. It seems Pontiac has put some thought into this marketing strategy. I think this is all in Google's master plan.
Now, more marketers will tell people to search Google in hopes of increasing their rankings through personalized search.
This is amazing and bought a lightbulb to my head - exactly what MOGmartin said. Making somebody search for your site in Google is going to be as valuable as listing your domain name.
I'm glad you posted this. It's gotten me a little excited. I can have a play around with personalised results now, something that is starting to have an effect on many people...
I'll have to bring this up in future meetings too... could potentially be of great use.
This seems similar to what Google does in regards to quality score on Adwords, the ads with the higher CTR earn better postions
AmbiPur did exactly this here in the Netherlands recently to promote their new odoriser system. In a TV commercial on NGC users were directed to google on the word 'scent' to find more info about the new product.
I couldn't find the commercial online but also see:https://www.talkingretail.com/products/product-news/12902-ambi-pur-creates-natural-scents.html
Very interesting, yet potentially tricky, tactic.
Looking at this from a slightly different angle, it could have a positive effect on rankings too. There was an interesting article on Get Elastic's blog just over a week ago that suggested doing something similar with email marketing (https://www.getelastic.com/emo/)
In summary, the article suggests:
It uses SEOmoz's own search ranking factors in justifying the campaign (where the top SEOs felt traffic and click-thru data accounted for 7% of the overall ranking algorithm).
Any thoughts?
That's a great idea and so easily implemented. Setting up a coupon to be generated when the visitor comes from Google is so easy that doing this could give you a tremendous bosst, especially if you have a large email list.
For companies that don't have that huge footprint of potential targets, an alternative may be to give something away to people who finds the site through Google.
GregPower
Few years ago I have done already just that. I was granting registered users with free access to members only area in exchange for entering my website via google search for my main keyword. It did work very well, my site went from page 3 to #1, in couple of months for a high traffic adult keyword. If you build strong community and offer them bonuses in exchange for keyword search entrance to your site , it can be very rewarding.
But potentially couldn't you sabatoge yourself by asking users to google certain keywords? It opens the possibility of them seeing and clicking your competitors link instead of yours if their results seem more relevant (even if they are in 2nd place).
I suppose this would work if you were encoraging users to search for your business/website name. But in that case you run the risk of having other sites which reference your site name pop up - especially if these sites have been visited before. Like review sites, or blogs that reference your page. For instance you got a crappy review on Angies List - a site which a user regularly frequents and is stored in their google personalised search. That review pops up in serps right below (above?) your site.
You would have to know exactly how your terms show up in serps before employing this method.
i would suspect that you wouldn't try this strategy unless you totally dominated the search results and there was little change of some other site changing that
jbblanton911
If those user are loyal members of your community it does not matter if you #1 or on page 29, just give them exact instructions on how to find you in the SERPs so they can find you and enter your site from search results. I have done it in the past ( like 3 years ago )with very good outcome.
Than buying traffic becomes a good idea. I can sell some :)
Then it will only affect search results of those who actually clicked into your website.(clickbot)
It doesn't affect others who didn't view your website. (real potential customers)
Id like to know peoples thoughts on the seperate issue of farming clicks i.e pls digg, pls retweet and now please search this and click on search result 80
its a seperate point to this discussion, but wondered if anyone could share data/research?
It all sounds good and great but would that mean that Wikipedia would start to rank even more because everyone, and i mean everyone has been on there atleast a couple of time and how many times have you seen their results being totally irrelevent to the search.
How would google decide that if someone searched for our company through a branded search would show my site again if that same person searched for a targeted search term.
Which is probably part of why Wikipedia does rank so highly for so many phrases.
I think Google would probably tweak things if things became too extreme for the same site ranking well across a huge amount of terms due to personalization.
It currently looks like one of the websites I visited before has been boosted about 1 position through for searches that were only tangentially related to the original searches and clicks that I did (and displays a landing page that I hadn't visited before).
Really nice article, Rand, thanks.
No doubt this strategy will create big impact on search results, no matter you signed in (web history)or signed out(180 days cookie).
I wonder if this strategy will benefit single search query or multiple search queries.
Take "pontiac" as an example, obviously millions of people will seach "pontiac", the question is, will this have impact on query "new sports cars"? ("new sports cars" is included in the title of website, so I assume it's one of the primary keywords) And I don't see pontiac.com ranks in top 10 for "new sports cars" on google.com (I guess it's because I never searched it before?)
If it can bring seo benefits to leverage authority of a website (benefits all keywords rankings), then increase brand awareness will become a key strategy of SEO. If it only leverages the ranking of a single search query or have very limited impact on other search query, I think advertisers will have to choose the search query to put in ad wisely.
It's just my $0.02.
I'm not sure I'm 100% clear on this, so please bare with me. Based on what you are saying if I lead people to search for "Acme Corporation" in the serps where I know that company shows up all over the results; then later on they search for "blue widgets" (which Acme Corporation makes) their site will stand a better chance of showing up?
My question is, how does this help with relevancy? I mean just because I did a search for Pontiac, does that mean I really want to see that for subsequent car searches? Perhaps I was just looking up a recent recall that they had (not that they have just an example).
Hey Ignite:
Far be it from me to be a Google authority, as I'm struggling with the rest of the herd to just keep up with the mighty empire they continue to build.
Relevant or not, my understanding of their intentions is to give added weight to those sites that are more heavily searched. The more a particular site is referenced in the SERP's, the more future weight will be given to it by Google.
The greater the "brand recognition" a site has, the more that "brand" will be tied to various search results.
Take what I say with a pound of salt as others more knowledgeable than I will certainly weigh in.
I think what you are saying makes sense. I realize I probably over simplified my example above. Thanks for the input.
I think it's quite a bit more nuanced than that. If you do 1000 searches for Pontiac and then search for "Toyota recall", Pontiac isn't going to magically pop up into the #1 spot. It is possible, though, that if you did an ambiguous search later, like "local car dealers", Pontiac could get a boost. This has some obvious advantages.
The other point of speculation is whether tens of thousands of people all searching for "Pontiac Grand Am" would give the brand a boost outside of individually personalized search. In other words, if 10,000 other people all searched for those keywords yesterday, would it have affected my searches today? At this point, it's hard to say, because Google isn't telling and it's nearly impossible to create an experiment on that scale.
Does this explain why - sometimes - when I search for "hosting" I receive back a SERP that suggest me related searches where I can find also some hosting companies brand?
That's a good point Dr. Pete. I like how sometimes you get personalized search, however the lure of the web for me has always been the fact that I could search and get things I may never have heard of before. It seems now, that is becoming less and less likely and just the "popular" things are being seen.
I'm curious how media pushes (like Google "Pontiac") play with query deserves freshness. Having tens of thousands of searches in a very short period seems like it would trigger QDF and skew/clutter the results.
This leads me to believe we should exchange our internal site search to Google search. What do you think?
A frivolous comment: Loved your howling wolf e-trade baby picture above, but you really should have included that milkaholic Lindsey saying something from the side :)
Rand - I am not going to argue the point that this tactic could definitely be quite powerful for SEO or that it is a HUGE opportunity to exploit the algorithm. But, is this really where we want to go with SEO?
This seems like an issue of where does this tactic fall? Should it be considered a white/gray/blackhat method?
I am taking a poll to see what hat everyone thinks it should fall into: https://bit.ly/cBKnhj
[iThanks to everyone inadvance who drops a vote on the poll!]
Hmm - I certainly hadn't considered it as a black/gray hat tactic. Rather, I'd think this is a great way to show Google that your users really like your site and want to see it in the results. These have to be people you've already captured in some way and have influenced to:
A) Perform the Query
B) Click your result
C) Have an engaged, positive visit
This seems like it stems from the principals of providing a good user experience and great content... I'm sure a savvier black hat could likely think of ways to abuse anything, but I certainly wasn't (and wouldn't) endorse that.
But, is this really where we want to go with SEO?
I don't think it's up to us to decide. It's up to Google, and if their algorithm starts favoring some over others, then it's our job as SEO's to take note of this so to be able to employ it effectively for our clients.
I don't see it as even grey. It's a very limited tactic to be sure as the only companies that would run it would be:
A) Wealthy enough to buy a Super Bowl spot, and
B) Certain enough of the results that would be returned in the SERP's (see my former comment)
Bullshit! "I don't think it's up to us to decide."
It is absolutely up to us to decide which tactics and techniques we do or do not deploy for our clients. This decision is based on some form of professional ethics. These ethics are built around the labels that certain methods get pegged as white/gray/blackhat by our industry in accordance with search engine webmaster guidelines.
For me, my ethics sense went off. This technique where we are intentionally inflating search engine traffic by telling people how to interact with the search engines to manipulate their personalized results into serving more favoriable results for our clients down the road. Even better, we do this (potentionally) without their comprehension of what has just happened to the search experience, until the cookies expire.
This may become a comprehensive search engine spamming issue that Matt Cutts & the Google Spam Team need to weigh in on.
mate... if you're gonna run a poll and bother sending people to your site... at least make sure it works!
Im on FF and Windows and your poll is bust. cant vote... cant see results... Last time I visit your site i guess ?
works just fine for me. maybe its time to get google chrome :)
I can see you are passionate about this so I'm trying to tread softly here.
We must not be on the same page Matthew. The point I tried to make was that if Google has built an algorithm that favors certain actions, and (I'm adding your sentence here) it's not against the search engine webmaster guidelines, then it's fair game to work with it if it fits your SEO efforts.
For example, if the search engines rank those who put keywords in the root url, then it makes it a tool for us to deploy for our clients. That's not black hat. That's just the way it is.
It's really a moot point though, because how many companies have the wherewithal to do a Super Bowl commercial anyway?
This type of messaging to drive people to search is a huge advantage to Google as well.
I couldn't see an advertiser saying "just go to Yahoo.com and search Pontiac" or even "go to bing.com and search Pontiac."
Google is search in the mind of most internet users, whereas Yahoo means many different things, and bing isn't nearly as well known or trusted.
Very interesting points, espeically in light of Google's Superbowl ad.
If I was you, I would have sold this idea to major advertisers 2 months ago.
Might be worth testing whether these work for on-site biasing of Personalized Search:
White hat: Embed a Google search on your site
Grey hat: Embed an Iframe with Google search and sample results, pre-loaded with your brand search
Black hat: Embed an invisible iframe with a Google search for your brand
I'm not encouraging any of the above in production, but it's worth testing. Obviously, the referrer is trivial for Google to see and use to un-bias Personalized Search results.
Not that I would ever do this, but this also presents an opportunity to spam the real time results with negative PR about who ever is running the commercial...
Imagine 1 million people searching for Google for Pontiac, while a dozen people post hundreds of negative comments or links to negative news stories on Twitter at the same time.
You could game it both ways - death to personalization!:P
I would say YES... I saw a HSBC add on the tube about 6 months ago where they asked you to "search" for a particular term. The problem was it wasnt a brand term, so not sure how successful that campaign was.
Also, with live results etc... isnt there the danger of negetive items coming up in the results. Aaaand how is this managed from a clients percpetives.
thnkx mate for replying.. but after your answer now i can take it in both ways like if client browse his site many times, then he will b happy with the rankings as it will be good at his pc n i have less burden(lolx) it will be also the same case at my desk..but it will not be actual picture... so then how can i check the real rankings? any guess?
yes.... I guess one could completely fool a client, or a client can completely fool the CEO etc by making sure they brand term search permanintly ;) hahaha
LOLX but apart 4m that mate what if i want to check real ranknings? did u know anything?
good point. i guess one could log out of google... clear cookies/web history and hope for the best ?
I do wonder if that starts to effect tools that sites like SEOMoz provide ???
Wow! I'm the first to make a comment...
So bascially, what your saying is that with this personalized search you could/probably use more external marketing strategies like viral marketing to market your brand name and in the process they just could google your company name as opposed to googling a keyword which you might not be ranking so well for and BOOM!! up you go...
Very interesting...
(darn! I missed the first spot by a minute, lol!)
As it was clearly expressed to me, being first comes at a steep price 'round these parts.
Tell me about it! Lol..
We live and we learn....
This blog post, which builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye's awesome video on Google News, provides publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting articles to Google News.
<a href="https://bookmarkingdemon101.com/"> bookmarking demon </a>
thats exactly why I produced this blog
Is Google Personalised Search Going To Kill New Websites and SEO? How Can New Sites Survive Google Personalised Search?
I think it could also backfire big time on Google when people get sick of always getting the same old results whenever they search for xmas or birthday presents, or anything else that you look for several times a year. Bing, Yahoo etc must be rubbing their hands together at the prospect of all the new traffic they are going to attract
--Edited by Jen: Removed 2nd link
While many of us SEO's study the SERPs every day and would notice things like the changing results as you click on the same result several times, I really doubt that the average internet user will be disaffected by seeing the pages they keep shopping from every Christmas or birthday coming up higher in the search results.