Google Rebrands Personalized Home Page

By Geoff Duncan May 2, 2007

Google Rebrands Personalized Home Page

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.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

Google just broke search

AI Overviews being shown in Google Search.

Google AI Overviews were announced a couple of weeks ago at Google I/O, and they've already proven to be rather controversial. The aim to provide high-quality answers to your questions summarized from the web, but a series of recent X (formerly Twitter) threads show how big of a fail it's already proven to be.

The response that went viral involves a very dubious pizza recipe. As reported, when prompting Google for an answer to the issue of "cheese not sticking to pizza," the AI Overview suggests adding nontoxic glue to your pizza to prevent the cheese from sliding off. The exact words the AI overview gave are as follows: "You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness." Where did the Google AI overview get the info as a source? An 11-year-old Reddit comment from this thread, in what was clearly a joke.

Computing

This new Google Sheets feature is going to save so much time

Google Sheets is open in the Safari browser on a MacBook Air.

After Google I/O 2024, Google continues to roll out features that bolster its productivity apps -- this time, specifically with Google Sheets. As picked up by The Verge, Google has announced a much simpler way to generate easily formatted tables in the Sheets app. This new Sheets feature has been around for many years in Excel and has recently reached Google. Better late than never.

The option is called Convert to table, and you can use it by opening a Sheets document and clicking Format > Convert to table when the option reaches you later this month or early next. With this new option, Google aims for a more Excel-type experience by adding filters for each column. The rows also get visual separators, saving you time by not having to select the rows manually to turn them gray. The Convert to table feature also brings filters and column types and makes the drop-down menu creation easier.