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Google's New Personalized Homepage
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."
More coverage at Google Blogoscoped.
I submitted this story about 30 mins ago but it looks like someone beat me to it.
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.
You never needed to anyway, the Google Accounts sign-in is a central login which gives you access to GMail, Groups, Video and everything else.
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."
You obviously have not looked at yahoo for a while. Google is cleaner but displays less and their colour scheme chould do with some work. The edit option displays very poorly against a similar shade background.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well, Microsoft at least it already has a aquivalent with a javascript RSS reader and everything, so Microsoft seems to be "ahead" in this case: http://www.start.com/1/
(although it lags a bit, for instance this story hasn't shown up yet).
Blame Slashdot. The RSS hasn't updated yet.
If you go to http://www.google.co.uk/ig/customize 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.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
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.
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.
...the nice user interface with proper tabs for Firefox clients.
Seriously, it's so much nicer than having the page reload when you click another tab. Why doesn't the FF start page use this?
Why suggest it here? Put it in as feedback to Google. They act on feedback, you know.
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