Personalization and Local Results now showing at Bing

Bing announced February 10th the introduction of a more "Personalized" search, which includes tailoring results based on your physical location and previous search history.

Personalized search like this isn't anything new, Google started doing it in 2005 and really went after it in 2009, so you're probably already quite aware of how this works, however Bing is trying to do it better than the competition.

The technology Bing is using, apparently is still in it's infancy and at this time location specific results are only being customized for those in the United States. Bing users outside the country see the same results regardless of their location.

Tests we conducted in late February showed Bing localizing search results based on the location set in your preferences or its best guess if you're not signed in. The best search queries to display the new location based results appeared to be restaurant related, with Bing pushing local sites up higher for these types of searches. The example below shows a search with the account preference set to Seattle, WA, a search for the keyword 'Pizza' and Bing automagically returns three Seattle area pizza Web sites out of 10 organic results.

We think there's a little extra sauce on this particular example, which was the same keyword used by Bing in their announcement. Other generic searches like this, from multiple different locations, rarely showed the clear effects of the new local organic results. Google certainly is using location far heavier than Bing in determining search result sets for keywords determined to be of local interest, such as: Dentist, Pizza and Auto Body Repair. It's quite likely Bing will improve at this, after all it's supposed to be a Beta feature at this time.

Bing also announced search results would take into account personal search history, for example if you have searched for ACS in the past and clicked the American Cancer Society page, subsequent searches for ACS would likely show the American Cancer Society domain ranking higher.

However we were not able to trigger this feature based on the past s...