2006 Google Gadget Awards

Google Personalized Homepage is an interesting project developed by the search giant that helps you create your own homepage that is customized with services provided by the company. This way, you can quickly access your Gmail's inbox, read Google News or check your Google Calendar.

Because users want more than Google services, the company decided to develop gadget support that helps us include tiny utilities into Google Personalized Homepage that will add new features to the service. Now you can use your favorite clock on your website or even add some amazing animated Christmas trees. Some of these gadgets are also compatible with Google Desktop, a downloadable application that allows you to access most of the Google's services directly from the desktop of your computer.

Many of these gadgets are not created by the company, Google deciding to let users develop their own utilities. To encourage the creation of new gadgets, the search giant released a contest with prizes for the students that develop the best utilities. Today, the company announced the winners of the contest with MapMyWord Dictionary as the best overall universal gadget.

"MapMyWord displays word definitions, synonyms, and relationships in graphs. It is an interactive graphic dictionary and thesaurus, which dynamically draws color-coded vivid representation of words, their relationships (16 types), and meanings in radial clickable graphs. Special editable features include wordlist difficulty setting, next word randomization, spelling suggestions, automatic height adjustment, sample usage mini-message, and clickable nodes and words."

If you want to see the entire list of winners published by Google, you should follow this link. Remember that you can test all these gadgets on your Google Personalized Homepage that is available here.