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Google's New Personalized Homepage

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu May 19, 2005 06:39 PM
from the putting-it-all-together dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Upgrades Announcements
jgaynor writes "Citing user requests to coalesce its disparate services, Google today released its new personalized homepage service. It allows you to arrange your Gmail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, weather and a few select news services (including Slashdot) on a single page. Future plans include Universal RSS support. Clearly a shot at existing services like My Yahoo."
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  • It was just about time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by puiahappy (855662) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:40PM (#12584319) Homepage
    I was waiting for this moment for a lot of time. Google have so many features, but it was missing the page that put them all together. Have a directory [dmoz.com], stock market feeds, dedicate search for Linux [google.com], email [gmail.com], free blog [blogger.com] and lots more ... Oh yeah and don`t forget about google adsense [google.com] and adwords [google.com]

  • One page to rule them all... (Score:5, Funny)

    by null etc. (524767) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:41PM (#12584326)
    One page to bind them.

    Seriously, I guess Google just got a new lease on life, considering it's supposed to die in 5 years, according to Microsoft.

  • There it is! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jackcarter (884148) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:41PM (#12584327)
    The start of the cluttered Yahoo-like interface. the fact that Google is clean and white is the reason most people flocked to it at first. At least the customization means that I can make it what I want.

    • Re:There it is! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stibidor (874526) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:45PM (#12584356) Homepage
      I believe the "cluttered Yahoo-like interface" is somewhat popular.

      Google is still "clean and white" if you leave the "/ig" off the end of the URL.

      And yes, you can make it what you want. :)
      • Hopefully, they take it the rest of the way and incorpoate groups-beta.
        Google could go the full Yahoo! monty, and have an interface that looks like "an Australian's nightmare", but I'd be very surprised.
        They seem to grasp the strategic non-value of such a turdberg.

        • Formatted (Score:5, Funny)

          by Jaiwithani (835259) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:39PM (#12584754) Homepage
          Googleweiss, Googleweiss,
          Every morning you greet me,
          Small and white,
          clean and bright,
          Works in Gecko and IE.

          Don't be complex
          Just search and index,
          Don't be evil forever,
          Googleweiss, Googleweiss,
          Bless my homepage forever.

    • Re:There it is! (Score:5, Informative)

      by bob whoops (808543) <bobwhoops@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:51PM (#12584413) Homepage
      From the FAQ:

      6. Why did you mess up the clean, crisp Google homepage?

      We didn't. If you want to keep using the original Google homepage, you can. In fact, we expect that many users will. The personalized homepage is for those users who want to see more of the information that matters to them in the same place. You can always switch back and forth between your personalized homepage and the original Google homepage by clicking "Classic Home" or "Personalized Home."

            • Re:There it is! (Score:5, Informative)

              by Michalson (638911) on Thursday May 19 2005, @09:13PM (#12585343)
              Tracking on the normal search page is done a little differently (though perhaps they just have some server side code that returns different methods based on browser). As you know, account or no account, all Google pages attempt to implant a "never expires" cookie that has a unique ID if a unique ID is not already found on your system. The ID is used to allow Google to associate all requests with you (and if you have an account, multiple computers can be tied to a single person/ID).

              For the regular search, rather then using a redirect script, it seems to use onmousedown javascript (in this way the link you click is a "direct" link to the URL). The mousedown script causes your webbrowser to load a hidden image (which is really a tracking image, the kind used by spammers in their email to report back to them). If you examine the javascript it sends the link you clicked, your unique ID, the position on the page the link was ("1" for the first link and so on) and two type parameters (ct="res" and sa="T") encoded as the URL for the fake image.

              • Re:There it is! (Score:5, Informative)

                by Michalson (638911) on Thursday May 19 2005, @09:44PM (#12585485)
                Very interesting. I was right, Google seems to have have multiple formats for what visually looks like the same result page. The underlying format determines if and how Google tracks your clicks. One factor that may play a part is the date - the unique ID in the cookie includes a checksummed date of when the ID was created. Some Google features (like the book excerpts) have already been shown to check this date and give different results based on whether your cookie appears to be an existing cookie, or if it appears that you just created it a short time ago. It would take some time to verify, but I would hypothize Google only starts including link tracking code once the cookie is old enough to mark you as a legitimate or otherwise worthwhile user.

              • Re:There it is! (Score:4, Insightful)

                by tylernt (581794) on Thursday May 19 2005, @10:02PM (#12585586)
                Isn't this the way that Google improves search results and updates PageRank etc? By tracking which links get clicked?

                If Google didn't track anything, their search algorythms would probably be a lot less efficient because they wouldn't be able to tell which of the search results were the ones that users found relevent.

    • Re:There it is! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hazem (472289) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:20PM (#12584638) Journal
      It's not the clutter per se that bothers me at Yahoo. It's all the friggin flashing, blinking, and pop-up ads.

      As for google... if they want to put all the stuff I like on one page, more power to them. Just don't clutter it with flashing, blinking, epileptic-fit-inducing ads.

    • One improvement to decrease clutter (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Chuck Chunder (21021) on Thursday May 19 2005, @08:10PM (#12584925) Homepage Journal
      Would be to have a "dismiss" link for the Word of the day and Quote of the day entries so they can be made to go away but automatically reappear again tomorrow.

      I quite like them, but after I've absorbed them I don't need to have them cluttering up the page for the rest of the day.
      • I like it, specifically because it's "underwhelming" and "far behind" the atrocity that is My Yahoo. It runs off of a cookie, you don't need an account and it's still nice and minimalistic. Also: am I the only one who spent like five minutes putting each module on the page and dragging them around?

  • greeeeeeeaaaat (Score:4, Funny)

    by dmf415 (218827) * on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:42PM (#12584334)
    Would be even nicer if i can integrate my yahoo mail too! ;-)
    • I listened to a few hours of the stockholder briefing. Some guy in the audience actually had the gaul to ask if he could use his Yahoo Mail with this new service. Bryn deferred to the PR chick who announced this - SHE SAID YES. As in 'yes we're in talks with other vendors to get 'hooks' to display their mail services'.

      Bottom line? Google's got balls. They repeatedly stressed that they dont track user statistics by services crossover or hits per person, but by user utility. The fact that they would allow and even per-emptively OFFER access to offsite mail shows that they're not just pulling our legs about that mantra . . .

  • More commentary... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RichM (754883) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:43PM (#12584339) Homepage
    More coverage at Google Blogoscoped. [outer-court.com]
    I submitted this story about 30 mins ago but it looks like someone beat me to it.

  • Notice the differences though (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stevyn (691306) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:43PM (#12584343)
    between google and yahoo. Google's is clean and compact while yahoo's is all over the place. People want simplicity and when so much information is displayed at once like on lots of portals, it's difficult to find anything.

  • WTF (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Bungi (221687) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:43PM (#12584344) Homepage
    The nice thing about this is that it talks to GMail via something else to create the preview so it gets around proxy blocks.

    I still can't actually read messages, but I can see if I have something that requires immediate attention instead of waiting until I get home.

  • One of like nine options total is to see slashdot's news items. Strange? Not really. Suspicious? Yeah, kinda. I mean, why would Slashdot be picked among all the tech news sites out there....?

  • It has slashdot (Score:3, Informative)

    by endx7 (706884) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:47PM (#12584380) Homepage Journal
    Even has slashdot as one of the things you can put on it.

    At least they didn't put this on the main front page. Stuff like this tends to be cluttered, and I dislike clutter.
  • Well personally I'm happy that Google keeps trying harder and harder to become the all-encompasing mega corp that we all need to place our faith in... An I for one welcome... eh.

  • Whoa, custom (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ecliptik (160746) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:51PM (#12584415) Homepage

    I love how you can customize it, it can even pull stories from slashdot (although it lags a bit, for instance this story hasn't shown up yet).

    If you don't like how they're arranged, just click and drag the boxes around, really truely awesome use of DHTML.

    My one gripe is with the gmail integration, when you open a message it looks a bit kludgy, and from there if you try and the inbox link at the top you get a "grrr! you have a popup blocker" message. Note that I'm using Firefox here, and from how FF friendly they are you think this wouldn't be an issue, oh well, it still rocks.

  • One thing left out. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DarkProphet (114727) <chadwick_nofx@@@hotmail...com> on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:51PM (#12584427)
    Pretty nice. The clean drag 'n drop and edit stuff is good. One thing I would have liked to have seen is a 'generic' RSS box instead of one specifically for /.

    Maybe they'll get around to that.

  • Pretty weak so far (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prostoalex (308614) on Thursday May 19 2005, @06:55PM (#12584453) Homepage Journal
    The interface is nice and clean, but it's still not My Yahoo!

    - No outside RSS feeds, so can't add anything beyond pre-selected sources
    - No user-selected color coding, so semantically the boxes are barely distinguishable
    - Small things, like inability to select a subset of Google news, not just top stories

    All fixable, and it's obviously a beta, but it's surprisingly a really raw beta.

  • OMG!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by lortho (700090) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:09PM (#12584564)
    You guys... seriously... it's Google... they released a product... that's non-beta... seriously, you guys, come quick!!!

  • DRAG AND DROP!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:11PM (#12584584)
    this is one of the most amazing web interface's i've ever seen. google has done some remarkable work with gmail and maps.google.com and this is even better.

    it would be nice if someone could make a toolkit for php or whatever to make web interfaces that are as rich as regular app interfaces. Qt for the web!!
  • ... http://grammar.google.com/ [google.com]

    coalesce it's disparate services -->
    coalesce its disparate services

    released it's new personalized homepage service -->
    released its new personalized homepage service


  • If you go to http://www.google.co.uk/ig/customize [google.co.uk] then try to set and save your settings, you'll find that it's pretty broken...

    It seems to send the page into a loop...in IE you will just receive continuous warnings that you are being redirected to an nonsecure page.

    -- Pete.

  • grrrr (Score:4, Funny)

    by judd (3212) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:28PM (#12584683) Homepage
    When will Google strip annoying extraneous apostrophes [angryflower.com]?

    Its != it's

    Thank you.

  • Redirection loop (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kbahey (102895) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:39PM (#12584755) Homepage

    Well, I clicked on the link in the article, and was able to setup a page and customize it.

    I then visited Google Canada's home page, and added /ig to it and tried to do the same, and ran into a redirection loop (seems google.ca tried to redirect to google.com, which tries to redirect to google.ca, ad infinitum...

    Now neither /ig pages work at all. I had to clear all the cookies to get back to one page that works.

    Hey Google guys! I know that some of you are reading this. Please fix it.

  • Too bad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Trailer Trash (60756) on Thursday May 19 2005, @07:56PM (#12584851) Homepage
    ...it'll be gone in 5 years. Oh well, I'm sure MSN will have something to replace it.

  • I find it really neat... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tommertron (640180) on Thursday May 19 2005, @08:22PM (#12585014) Homepage Journal
    That they included Slashdot in the news services. Right up there with the New York Times and Wired News. All stuff that I read, and pretty cool that Google reads them too!

  • This is my new home page. No, I'm serious. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MsGeek (162936) on Thursday May 19 2005, @08:26PM (#12585043) Homepage Journal
    I am positively loving this. I've previously used my Yahoo account because it has everything I need when I'm traveling, or when I'm using the computers at school. I can also set it up with a two-column format that is friendly for my Original Recipe iBook. Yes I know you can also do that in Yahoo but it's just not as elegant.

    I could use a link to Google Maps, My Google Groups and some sort of bookmark storage scheme, but this will do for now.

    Oh yeah, it loads really, really quickly too.

    Call me a Google fangirl, but this rocks.
  • As I scanned through the critical discussion of this new compilation of services by Google, I realized how calculated their marketing efforts are. It now seems quite probable that there are any number of Google employees currently tracking this thread on Slashdot. A free analysis by one of the most vocal net cultures of geeks (and n00bs)!

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