A very interesting essay on why “personalizing” searches — having a search engine like Google trying to weight search results based on what you’ve looked at, or expressed an interest in, before — is not always a good idea. All the points are worth consideration (and apply to many sorts of “personalizing” paths).
The bottom line is (as #10 implies) that the human brain is far better at figuring out what it wants at any given moment than any sort of personalization algorithms.
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It sort of depends how you shop. If I go into a hardware store to buy 1/8-inch pop rivets, I’m likely to just wander up and down each aisle, looking at all the stuff. Then I buy the rivets and leave. Later some other problem comes up, an answer pops into my head and people think I’m a genius, which I’m not; I just look at stuff and remember it for later.
I do the same thing in bookstores and also when I’m searching the web – looking at stuff I may never have heard of before. It may be irrelevant now but later, who knows? “Customized” search engines would mess that up. I find lots of interesting things that were just next to other stuff that I was looking for.