People always ask me who we compete with, and I have become accustomed to unsheepishly responding with “Google”. That’s not to say we’re trying to topple the 800-lb. gorilla, mind you, but anyone who’s in the Personalization business and Recommendation Engine development world ultimately has to concede that the most likely generic player in this category is indeed GOOG.

Today, the GMonster seems to have subtly added a section to their Google News portal. It seems they can now recommend news items to you based on past searches. Cool! (Presumably it will work better than this screen shot indicates when you’ve been running it for a while, ours does better from the get-go).

The key to being a successful recommendation engine is in establishing a conversation with the user, without necessarily requiring them to do a lot of work, about what it is they might be looking for in the future. You need to get a handle on some sort of profile of the user before you start making matches.

The failure of the Management Team to understand this is largely responsible for why nobody ever used PubSub 1.0 … they only had 72,000 users when they died.

All Recommendation engines therefore need some sort of starting point for building context. That’s why we’ve initially implemented Pulse within Facebook: a great place to build context around users and their friends. So knowing what you’ve searched for in the past, for Google, is as good a starting point as any. The question remains, though: how many people are logging in when they use the Google search engine? I’m guessing low single-digit percentages, but that’s still a whopping number. The extra value of this might compel people to jump in, though, and start using their news aggregator more.

I’ve long suspected they were playing with this technology, and I believe that Bob Wyman, who likely learned his lesson @ PubSub, is behind it. In fact, I was getting uncannilly similar news matches to very far-flung things I’d searched for in the past popping up in my News Feed for a while before this function emerged as one of the panes of my Personalized Google News page.

So, anyway, nice to see Google moving the ball forward. There’s room for all of us.