From time to time you hear about some new webmasters bragging about how they outrank sites like Amazon, About.com or even WikiPedia. And then you try and duplicate their search and their site is nowhere to be found. Could it be a different datacenter? Could be, but it is probably something else. Google Personalized Search.

This actually happened last weekend at my SEO Rainmaker event. This person was showing off their new rankings of a brand new site and their bragging was deflated when I had them log out of their Google account and then do the search again.

Personalized search is powerful and will always show sites you visit most often at the top of the rankings … which are usually your own sites.