Google adds personal touch

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 20 May 2005 at 12:11

Google is breaking with its philosophy of providing a 'clean' home page with the introduction of 'personalisation' features. The new facility available at Google Labs allows a visitor to get an at-a-glance update of personalised information such as the weather, news, share quotes and their Gmail inbox if they have such a thing.

Among the feeds on offer are stock tickers from the Dow Jones and Nasdaq, news from Slashdot.org, Wired, the New York Times and the BBC. There are also handy word/quote of the day feeds, the weather and a list of local movies near you. There are also driving instructions available via Google maps, which is an odd thing to put on a personalised home page, but one can suppose it's just there as a test.

The customisation facilities are very similar to those rolled out for Google News a couple of months ago. Visitors can choose from a limited range of functions and sources and select the number of results they wish to display on the Google home page.

The change to the Google home page will raise eyebrows among old search hands. Part of the original attraction of Google was that it was a pure search facility and not cluttered by the rush to portalisation that was occurring among rivals at the time such as Yahoo! and Alta Vista. Many will fear that creeping portalisation will produce the same kind of cluttered page that Yahoo! and MSN are actually trying to get away from. However, purists can still have their clean or 'classic' home page.

Personalisation has been tried many times by portals trying to improve the user experience and make their sites stickier but without a great deal of success. Nevertheless, Google admits that as search becomes increasingly commoditised, it needs to add features to build customer loyalty. The first stab at supporting customised home pages adds little that has not been tried before and it remains to be seen as to whether personalisation becomes a mainstream feature.