Google Offers Personalized Home Page - But Wait, There’s More…
(Page 3 of 4 )
Google has set up a group for people who have personalized their Google homepage and want to talk about it. The company does not do this for everything in Google Labs. As of this writing, the group has more than 4000 members, and is apparently pretty active. Those who join this group can choose to read it in four different ways: online (no email, checked by default); abridged email (no more than one email per day); digest email (up to 25 messages bundled in one email, and no more than two emails per day); or regular email (about 71 emails per day).
As you would expect with those numbers, the forum is full of comments from users. Many people who are using a personalized form of Google’s homepage offer useful suggestions here, along with praise for coming up with the new feature. Even complaints about apparent bugs seem to be given in the form of constructive criticism, for the most part. The forum does include a few ads, placed discreetly on the right hand side of the page; just below the ads are “Related Pages,” which link to Google-related news items.
This ability to personalize a search engine’s interface, and the huge number of suggestions from members of the personalization group as to how it could be usefully personalized, made me wonder how the other search engines handle this. If Google is trying to let users make a personal page that looks more like Yahoo or MSN, can Yahoo or MSN’s search pages be made to look more like Google’s? I knew that Yahoo and MSN offer tools that let users personalize their home pages, so I decided to perform a little experiment.
I visited the Yahoo home page to see whether its interface could be cleaned up via personalization to look more like Google’s. I had not visited Yahoo in a while, so I was somewhat surprised to see a link right below the search box, with the text “Yahoo! Search –- When you just want to search, use search.yahoo.com. Try it now.” Clicking on this link brought up an interface that could be the twin brother of the classic Google interface. As for MSN, I already knew how to clean up that particular interface, since I wrote a story about the changes it made to its search engine. Pointing my browser to http://search.msn.com/ brought me to a very clean, spare page. Again, it resembles the classic version of Google’s home page, but not as much as Yahoo’s Yahoo! Search page. It boasts more of a Microsoft theme, which is only to be expected.
Next: Why is Google Offering this Feature? >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
