hey anders, you might want to get in touch with martin feuz who looked into this question. i could not find his website perspectoma.com anymore, which was a lot of fun. but, here is a description of what he did as described by rosa menkman: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/query/2009/11/17/martin-feuz-ch-google-perso... "Feuz starts his presentation by posing four main questions he wanted to deal with while creating Perspectoma. • how soon (after how many queries) will Google Personal search play a roll in the Google search returns? • how do these personal returns develop in terms of frequency and intensity? • what underlying patterns can we identify? • how will grouping of profiles influence the search terms? To find answers to these questions, Feuz describes the research he did according to the 3 ghost accounts based on the characters Kant, Foucault and Nietzsche. He trained all of the accounts equally in training sessions with the help of software that did different search queries. To do this, he had to find a way to make an artificial profile relational for subjective inspection of personalized search results. To tackle this problem, he used specific books for the different theorists. He also had to find a way to get plenty search terms to create profiles." do let us know how the pilot study goes. best, s. Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm