Personalized Google

Filed under: — 8:01 pm

Google has a new personalized home page feature that displays content you choose on a Google search page suitable for use as a home page. You can include things like Google News and BBC news on the page, and your GMail inbox if you have one. A nice JavaScript UI lets you drag the boxes around the page. Here’s the announcement at Google Blog, and a reaction from Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo, who finds the whole thing eerily familiar.

They seem to be planning full RSS (or Atom?) support, but for now there are only about 10 feeds you can select from. Along with the BBC, Wired News, and Slashdot, I’m very pleased to report that they’ve chosen my Quotes of the Day as one of the feeds. It is using RSS, as you might have guessed, and someone at Google was nice enough to email me to let me know they’re using my feed and warn me that it might bring me some traffic (bring it on!)

As Jeremy pointed out, Google has taken a tiny step toward becoming a “portal” rather than a mere search engine. It will be interesting to see where they go from here.

3 responses to “Personalized Google”

  1. Imitation and the Slippery Slope of Portaldom: My Google “Google is not a portal!” they cry. “Google is different…” we’re told. But a funny thing happened today. Not only are they inching ever more down the slippery slope to portaldom, they’ve decided that we at Yahoo have really been on the right t…

  2. sutrix says:

    This move was always in the cards. I just hope they don’t go the Microsoft way too soon.

  3. Personalized Google Personalized Google

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