Absolute vs. Personalized Web Perspecitves

This funny post by Brad Feld got me thinking about customized search.

Brad's joke works because he thinks everyone else will get the same result from the search. However, yesterday my friend Fabian was so excited that his blog came up on the page of a search result for "outfoxed extension". But it was page 8 in my results, so clearly Google is doing some personalization. (And no, neither of us had turned on Google's personalized search.)

There is value in personalization, but there is also value in knowing that other people see the web the same way. I think personalization trumps here, but it's not clear.