Google makes mobile personal; launches search boxes

By Alun Williams

Posted on 13 Jan 2006 at 15:50

Google is expanding its Google Personalized Home feature to mobile devices in the US. It means users who have already customised the Google homepage on their desktop will see the same functionality replicated on their phone.

It was back in May 2005 that Google began introducing personalisation features. Breaking with its respected philosophy of providing a 'clean' home page, the facility allows a visitor to get a portal-like, at-a-glance update of personalised information such as news, the weather, share quotes and their Gmail inbox if they have an account.

To make the change on their phone, users who have already set up a personalized Google homepage just have to visit google.com, select the 'Personalized Home' link, and then sign in with their Google account username and password. The next time they visit google.com on their phone, they will see the customized content modules. It should work with any phone with an XHTML-capable web browser.

Note, however, that Google is currently only providing the free service to mobile users in the States. A Google spokesperson told us that there were currently no plans to bring the service to Europe.

You can find out more about setting up a personalized Google homepage at http://www.google.com/ig.

Staying with the prolific Google - the company has today also announced BlackBerry support for Google Talk and Google Local - it has also unveiled two more Google Minis.

Marking the first anniversary of the customised hardware boxes, Minis with extended capacity for 200,000 documents are now available for $5,995, and for 300,000 documents at $8,995, in addition to the existing 100,000 document version available for $2,995 (£2,000). No UK pricing for the new models has been confirmed.

These Google-in-a-box search appliances are complete PCs with operating systems, with the Google search software built in. They can be used as a search tool by organisations either internally or externally, indexing a range of documents including HTML, text and PDF files.

The Google Mini made its debut in January 2005, but only became available in the UK in May.