Robert Scoble has a very interesting post today about personalization and google. He was getting his search result pages in Spanish because he was probably traveling to a Spanish speaking country.

I very strongly believe in personalization and what is can do for us (the users) if done right. The problem is that too many times services like google (amazon, netflix, etc) focus on very wrong parameters instead of things that should matter most for the users.

This is my story: Last month I placed an order for 4 books in amazon.com. My last order at amazon web store was back in 2003. Logging in with my account after almost 4 years, I was faced with a link on top of my page:

Hello [my name]. We have recommendations for you.

Clicking it, I was sent to a page where a message on the top said something like (I missed the chance to capture it):

Sorry [my name]. We have no recommendations for you today.

:)... and the rest of the page was full of useless gifts and other items for me to buy. Isn’t it a bit stupid that amazon gave me the link for recommended items before checking their database to see if any existed for me?

I continued shopping, found a book I wanted to place on my shopping cart, and a fancy message appeared on top of the page:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (Some restrictions apply)
Make sure to select FREE Super Saver Shipping as your shipping speed at checkout.

VERY NICE! I clicked on "Some restrictions apply" (smaller font size link). A page full of legal jargon appeared. A couple of page-downs revealed the truth:

Applies to U.S. delivery addresses in the 50 states only, including Alaska and Hawaii. Geographic shipping restrictions may apply to particular products; for example, some Tools & Hardware items may not be shipped to Alaska and Hawaii using FREE Super Saver Shipping.

I wonder... How difficult is it for amazon to check my GeoIP or my VISA billing and shipping address, only to see that I live in Europe?

Ok, so let’s say I live in Europe but I am on vacations in the USA and want to shop from amazon. This would make me eligible for super free saving. It would be a great waste if I missed this offer, so amazon thinks that "free shipping" must always be displayed. That’s fine. There is a way for me to escape the hustle clicking the link and being faced with all this legal jargon, by having a link that said:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (For U.S. shipping addresses only. Some restrictions apply)

Having the best personalization algorithm in the word, while making me wonder helpless around amazon’s pages (full of literally hundreds of links) is crazy!

Badly designed pages, is another thing. I believe amazon has got it all wrong with the design lately. It has become a store full of cluttered pages with information and links everywhere, confusing me more than helping me. But I’ll leave this for a future post.

Scoble’s story and mine prove that many times we see the tree but miss the forest. I really strongly believe that the future of the web lies in personalization (some will call it web 3.0 I guess). But searching for Chinese restaurants does not make me a Chinese speaker.

Labels: amazon, google, personalization, recommendations