I’ve been using personalized search across a variety of sites for sometime now. Eurekster has been my favorite – and not just because I am an advisor to the company.

Google’s entry into the market looks a bit like Rollyo with advertising, customized look and feel and a bit of Eurekster’s keyword flavoring. Overall, a good start and good for the personalized search market. You want to see the traffic boost that Eurekster gets when someone like Google enters the market… Very much like when Yahoo! took a swing. hard to buy that kind of lift as a start-up.

Comparing Google to Eurekster I don’t see anything missing on the Eurekster side. What is missing on the Google side is the learning, buzzcloud and community engagement (they do have a variation on this but only allowing users to suggest sites to add to the index). The buzzcloud is key for drawing users into use the search and the community stuff will be key to improving the search results.

Eurekster should be thrilled that the two search leaders are in fact following their innovations. It’s about the 5th time someone has come out with something that has looked to threaten their business but typically it seems to encourage more growth (e.g. Wink, Rollyo launches, Yahoo Search builder, Google Flavors, Google Co-op).

So what happens next? Maybe Google becomes the Gorilla in the market. Maybe, much likewith the acquisition of Blogger, they become another player and in fact contribute to accelerating awareness and adoption across the market. Either way, this is a great move for personalized search and supports the few that becoming your very own Google is a good thing.