More personalized features from Google

Google adds recommendation features to the Google Toolbar and Personalized Home Page.

We have already noted Google’s new Web History feature. But Google has brought us more innovations this week:

“Picks for you” button for the Google toolbar

If you use the Google toolbar, you can now add a “picks for you” button. If you are a toolbar user a click on the link over will add a new button to the bar.

If you click on that button Google will open a site that it thinks is relevant for you. The sites are selected on the basis of your own search history and the search history of others that share your interests.

If you click on the small triangle next to the button, Google will show you 50 recommended pages.

Recommendations page for the Google personalized home page

If you are using Google’s personalized home page you may ask Google to add another tab or page with automatically generated recommendations.

As Search Engine Land puts it you “simply add a new tab, name it ‘recommendations’ and tick the ‘I’m feeling lucky – automatically add stuff based on the tab name’ checkbox.” (A bit complicated if you ask us).

The recommendation page is a mash up with recommended gadgets, searches, videos, news, pages and groups.

Froogle looses its name

And in a related area:

Google’s not so very famous shopping search engine has been given a new and much more boring name: Google Product Search. (What about services?) We liked Froogle better, although we do see that many found it hard to understand what it was all about.

Google will continue to add shopping search results to regular Web search results.

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