Adwords Personalisation: Google’s handling of ambiguous queries

When search queries are ambiguous, Google attempts to disambiguate and present the most relevant results based on the user’s previous search history and analysis of the concepts within the query. We know this is the case with the organic results. Earlier this month, Amit Singhal on the official Google blog described some of the philosophy behind the ranking of search queries. He writes about the advances in understanding what the user actually wants beyond the 2-3 words that they type at any given time.

I saw some evidence of disambiguation happening in adwords just recently.

The example was with the query “web contacts”. The first search and you get a mix of ads, some for contact lenses and some for online dating. If you then search for “contact lenses” and then search for “web contacts” again, the ads shown are only those relevant to contact lenses. If you then do a search for “singles online” and then search for “web contacts” again, the mix of ads appears again.

Interestingly, once I got the subset then it didn’t matter if I typed in lots of unrelated queries, opened a new browser, restarted the computer or made sure I was logged out of personalised search. Whenever I searched for web contacts I only got contact lens ads. The only way to get the full set again was to search for singles online and then search for web contacts.

It’s similar to intersecting queries except that in this case it’s narrowing the results set rather than widening it and it appears to be wider in application than two consecutive queries.