Personalize Your Web Search Experience With iGoogle

Back in the early days, Google and Yahoo! were not the search engine giants that they are right now. You would probably remember the portals and directories during their heyday–MetaCrawler, Netscape, AskJeeves, Excite, and the like. It’s only later on that the two aforementioned companies have grown to be the top two in the search market.

What’s markedly different with these portals and directories and Google is that these were stuffed with a handful of information, while Google had a plain home page, with only the search box and a few links. This is good for some, especially users who are bandwidth-challenged, and those who prefer clean, minimalistic looks. Other people, however, might want to have access to all their important information at a glance.

Other directories and that allow for customization of home pages are Excite.com and My Yahoo, for instance. Google offered this before as a “personal homepage” feature, but now it’s called iGoogle, where the personalizations are now part of the search home page. iGoogle lets users easily customize the look and feel of their search home page, and even add information widgets.

You get six themes to choose from, and these are not just color schemes. You can also feature a header picture, similar to how you would design your blog.

When you log in to google.com, you have the option of the classic home page and iGoogle. You can switch between these by clicking on the appropriate link at the upper right corner of the google.com page. Assuming your browser has cookies enabled, your preference (either classic or iGoogle) will be remembered across browser sessions.

Click on iGoogle and you will be brought to your iGoogle home page. If you’re not yet logged in, Google asks you to either login or sign up for a Google account first.

Once you’ve logged in (or signed up), you can customize how your iGoogle search page appears by clicking either of the two links found below the search box: Select theme and Add stuff.

We discussed how you can change your theme earlier, and we will now talk about further personalizing your iGoogle experience by changing the content, the order and arrangement of the gadgets/boxes on your iGoogle page. All you need to do is to click the Add stuff link, and you will be taken to a page filled with gadgets to add to your iGoogle page.

You can browse for gadgets using the navigation pane to the left (popular, tools, communication, news, finance, etc.). Once you’ve chosen which gadgets you want on your page, click the “add it now” button, and you can now use the gadget you added. You don’t even need to click “save”!

For instance, we want to add the Garfield comic gadget, we just click add it now.

Once you’ve added a gadget, Google will ask you if you want a list of other suggested iGoogle gadgets. This is based on the type of gadget you’ve chosen, and what other people who chose that gadget have added (much like Amazon’s book suggestions, I would say).

Click the back to homepage link to return to your iGoogle home page, and you will see the gadgets you just added at the top.

You can then arrange and re-arrange your gadgets as you please. You can shade (the equivalent of minimizing, much like shading in Linux and Mac OS Classic) by clicking the - button, or remove the gadget by clicking X. The down arrow button gives you features like sending the gadget to a friend or getting suggestions for other gadgets to install.

You can fill your iGoogle page as much or as little as you like, but if you like packing all those gadgets in there, then you might as well use tabs to organize your gadgets and lessen the visual clutter. iGoogle even has the “I’m feeling lucky” function for this, where it adds content to the new page, based on the tab’s name/title. More on how to fill your new tab/page next.