Google Rebrands Personalized Home Page

Google has finally decided to name its personalized home page service "iGoogle," and now lets users create sharable "gadgets" without programming.

Internet giant Google has rebranded its personalized home page tool as iGoogle, while adding a new featuring: the ability to create home page modules (or “gadgets”) without any programming.

Google has offers personalized home pages since 2005, under the deliberately generic monicker “Personalized Homepage.” The new iGoogle incorporates all of the previous functionality while adding new “gadget” capability. Within iGoogle, a gadget is a home page module which users can define for themselves and share with friends or family members: currently available gadget type including photo streams, YouTube channels, quotes services, countdown timers (”only 27 more days of school!”), personalized lists, and a “daily me” gadget offering at-a-glance status and updates. Users can create personalized gadgets from existing samples without any programming knowledge: just copy and paste a URL, type some text, and you’re good to go. Gadgets can be set to update automatically so people you’ve shared them with can get constant updates.

Google is also offering a selection of themes for iGoogle users, and is rolling out localized versions of iGoogle for 22 international markets. If users supply Google with location information, themes will update according to the local time of day. Reports also have Google applying location-based information in other ways: saved locations in Google Maps, for instance, may cause Google to filter search results based on location if a search query doesn’t provide other useful contexts for ranking the relevancy of results.