Google Offers Personalized Home Page - Why is Google Offering this Feature?
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It is worth keeping in mind that this feature is only available if you sign up for it. If you’re not signed in, or if you click on the “Classic Google” link, you see Google’s traditional vanilla interface. That said, why is Google altering something that has worked for years and so typifies the search engine in many people’s minds?
According to Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer products, the company believes it has developed a “critical mass” of features that visitors can use to get helpful information. It is not an attempt by Google to make the site more “sticky.” “We are still interested in getting people off our site to the places that they want to go (online),” Mayer was quoted as saying in an Associated Press story.
That approach has worked so far, but Google may need to change it to go further. For April 2005, research firm comScore Media Matrix rated Google the fourth most visited site on the Web, with 78.6 million unique visitors. That sounds good, but look at the competition: number one was Yahoo (116.3 million), two was the Time Warner Network, which includes AOL (115.8 million), and three was MSN/Microsoft (111.5 million). One of the clear differences between Google and the other three sites is the interface; the others look much more like Internet portals, where a visitor can choose from a variety of presumably useful information.
Keep in mind that Google’s profits come not directly from search itself, but from advertising. Google makes money when users click on the advertising links displayed on its site. It makes a smaller amount of money from ads it delivers to hundreds of other websites. This gives Google a huge financial incentive to increase its unique visitor figures. It is typical of Google that the company is not simply offering users an interface that looks more like Yahoo’s, but letting them personalize the home page so that it delivers exactly what they want –- no more and no less. Many people like the new feature, even though there is clearly room for improvement (after all, it is still in beta). It will be interesting to see what personalization options become available once this feature graduates from Google Labs.
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