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Some mornings you get out of bed and the world is just the same as you left it the night before. Then there are other mornings when you sit down in front of your computer and find that overnight the world has changed dramatically.

Obviously for the real world nothing much has changed ... the Olympics are still starting tomorrow and Beijing is still covered in smog. But for those of us who depend on Google in one way or another ... and isn't that most of us? ... things are starting to change in a big way. I'm beginning to see that some people in the United States are finding an interesting message on Google's search engine results pages when they do a search.

The message reads 'Customized based on recent search activity. More details' and that links to another message that tells people that 'Where possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity.' I'm not seeing any of that when I do searches here in Australia ... yet ... but there's no doubt that Google is really starting to roll out it's idea of personalized search and it will have a major impact on us.

At the moment personalized search only seems to having an impact on page one of Google's search engine results pages but that doesn't necessarily mean that you just get pushed further down the page if a personalized result replaces one of your listings. Some of those who have been doing some quick checking have found that their listings are just plain disappearing instead of dropping down the page and page 2 of the results pages is remaining intact.

The talk and the thinking is now on what a webmaster can do to ensure that their sites are going to do well in personalized search. Steve and I already have our thinking caps and are looking at ways to continue to pull in all the search engine traffic we can get our greedy little fingers on and that's what you should be doing too.

At the same time that you're thinking about ways to overcome the difficulties that personalized search could cause you should also be thinking about some of Google's other search engines. For example I know that quite a few people really don't like getting traffic from Google Images but have you ever tried it for yourself?

In fact, have you ever done any testing and evaluation for yourself or do you just rely on the word of others? Yes I know that it can be hard to find time for testing and experimentation but if you want to really get ahead in this industry then you simply have to find the time to do your own hard yards and not rely on the word of others.

This is an industry where there are so many variables that it's quite possible for your experiences and your results to be totally different to the next guy so why should you depend on that 'next guy' for advice ... especially when it comes to anything related to search engines?

If you want to be serious about this industry then you really do need to get out and find the answers yourself. Sure you can take onboard what other people might say but don't blindly follow them without testing to see if your experiences are going to be the same.

Obviously you're not going to do your testing on sites that are important to you. You don't want to kill a good revenue-producing site by trying pushing the limits and upsetting Google. Instead you need to do your testing on domains that you won't mind losing if Google does put you to the sword.

Go out and buy some cheap domains, host them on cheap hosting that is a long way from your sites that Google trusts and that make you money and then test and experiment till you find what works for you and what doesn't. Out there on the fringe with those disposable sites you can be as black hat as you like ... but just make sure that there's no trail that Google can follow back to your more valuable sites. You can push the limits, you can try new things, you can make discoveries and gain the edge over your competitors.

You can even go so far as to install a good analytics program on those throw-away sites and spend some time looking over the results that they throw up. You could be very surprised at those results because you just might find that some of what you've been told is just a load or rubbish and some traffic sources are a lot more valuable that you were lead to believe.

And while you're experimenting don't forget to do some testing on some of the social networking sites that are out there too. Look beyond FaceBook and MySpace because there is a lot of potential in some of the newer sites like Twitter ... if you're creative.

Of course you can go along and try and spam them but that's just plain boring and very unimaginative. Break out of that old mold and do something totally different that just might work for you ... but you won't know unless you do some testing.