This is where search results are custom tailored to your personal profile. Now Direct Hit is making such a system available to its partners. Direct Hit already provides results that are ranked by user popularity through a variety of venues, with HotBot being best known. There, you can do a search, then choose to view sites ranked in order of user popularity. That popularity is determined by measuring which sites users actually select the search results.
Personalized search goes a step further.
Services like Yahoo and Excite already have millions of registered users who have provided basic demographic information such as age, sex and geographical location. Direct Hit's system can marry this type of information to the sites that users choose from search results. Its limited test system so far shows that results for men are dominated by sites allowing online purchase of flowers, while results for women tend to have more sites providing pictures of flowers or online ordering of seeds. It's a very powerful concept, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it actually works on a large scale. That may happen if one of Direct Hit's existing partners, or a new partner, picks up the option.