07 May, 2007

Google's Personalization Push: iGoogle, Localization, Gadget Maker -Read Write Web

Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot this year. In regards to its personalized homepage, Google has always had far more gadgets available on its platform than live.com, Netvibes or Pageflakes. Currently there are over 25,000 different Google gadgets that you can put on your iGoogle page.

Here is some useful background to Google's personalization efforts. Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person, Google thinks of personalization in 3 parts:
  • Search Your own stuff (like Google Desktop Search, Web History)
  • Traditional (Pull) Search
  • Push Search (like recommendations, iGoogle/ personalized homepage)
Google seems to be fighting a two-pronged battle with their personalization efforts - one is to keep themselves ahead of the alternative search engines, and the other is to one-up Yahoo, Microsoft, Netvibes, Pageflakes and the other personalized start page contenders.

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