Google in an attempt to re-invent its homepage has launched the personalized version titled as iGoogle. This one is similar to MyYahoo (the personalized homepage offered by Yahoo!) who is currently the leader of customizable Ajax-based homepages, in terms of user base. With iGoogle, its users can integrate a large number of Google services, content tabs from RSS feeds etc onto their homepage. Google can also recommend interesting items to you, based on your user behaviour it learns from the past queries made, results viewed etc. Google has also expanded its Web History tool, where it can keep track of much more information of your web activity and not just the search history. Although users might find it irksome and invasion of privacy when they notice the amount of information Google knows about them, however there are options where the user can remove any of their personal information and constrain the logging of the history data. The other good part of the new homepage is that users can now embed their self-made gadgets (similar to Yahoo! Widgets). The users can design their own gadgets by simple tasks like form-filling and file uploads without much coding know-how.
With this, Google wants to take the personalization of its search engine to the next level, by discarding the notion of "one size fits all" and contextualising their results to the user's needs by considering the geographic location of the user (specified by the user in his/her Google profile). At the moment, Google is offering this personalized homepage service to about 40 countries and 26 languages.
This kind of implementation is termed as a push-based recommender service, where the system is pushing or enforcing certain kind of results onto the user, as opposed to the pull-based recommender service, where the user requests for results. A push-based system may not always work optimally. For instance, an English-speaking person living in Italy will have his homepage interface and the displayed content heavily influenced by the regional considerations. An example would be the Google News feeds, which would by default display him news from Italian newspapers, unless the user explicitly selects otherwise. The same argument can be applied to the result ranking in their personalized search, which gives a higher weightage to the previously viewed results and typecasting the information need of the user, which may not remain static over a period of time.
There is a visible bug in iGoogle at the moment, because in my case I was already using the personalized homepage of Google. After this switch to iGoogle, I found much of my personalized content missing and being replaced by regional stuff. I used to have RSS feeds from some sites which I had found interesting, but to my shock I found them to be replaced by some regional content being extracted from Italian sites. I hope Google fixes this one soon and I get to view my favoured content soon. This glitch also raises the issue, of how dependent a web user can become on Google. How much we rely on it for our day-to-day web activity and any minor blip on Google's behalf effects the web usage of an ordinary user.
