In my opinion, Personal Search won’t put SEOs out of business, it just causes us to evolve or refocus our attention.

• Will Personalized Search stop me from building web sites that are easily crawlable? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from doing keyword research, to create content target to user’s search? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from doing on-page optimization to help the engines better understand the page’s focus? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from link building? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from creating enticing page titles and descriptions for my content? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from measuring conversions from search? No.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from doing local optimization? No, and it may even cause me to do more.
• Will Personalized Search stop me from checking rankings? No, but it will curb it a bit, since how my results are ranked may be different than a client’s or end user’s.
• etc.

Every six months or so, we get the “SEO is dead” pronouncements after the search engines make publicized changes. Each time, over the past 8 years, the pronouncements have been wrong. In this case, they are wrong as well. But if SEOs react to changes with a business-as-usual attitude, they will start to see a reduction in results.