eWeek: Google Getting Personal with Search
PCWorld: Google Gets Personal

Chances are, new search ideas will pop up first in Google Labs. The lab at Google is playing now with personalization, and the toy they have put out there for us to play with is a personalization engine based on broad, categorical profiling.

The personalized profile does seem to improve results a bit. But if everyone could get over this annoying privacy paranoia, it would be great to see how much better the results would with a long-term profile based not just on keywords searched, but also links clicked. Or, even better, what people clicked on… and then didn't hit the back button.