Did you ever think how many billion dollars Google could have made if he had sold that white space below the search field as advertisement space? If you haven't, don't bother to do it now, because Google decided to offer it to users.
Right after we found out about Google Fusion, we decided to test the new feature which can be accessed at
www.google.com/ig.
To be able to use this service you must have a Google Account and if you don't, Google lets you create one.
Once you have the account or after you typed in the login information, you will be able to personalize your google.com page by choosing one of the options currently offered by Google: Gmail, Stock Market, New York Times, BBC News, Slashdot, Google News, Wired News, Weather, Movies and Driving Directions. The last two options are: Quote of the Day and Word of the Day, which are two services provided by www.quotationspage.com and www.dictionary.com.
For the news channels, Google can display the last 9 entries,
and for the Wheather or Movies information you have to type in the zip code of the area you live in.
After filling all the fields, click on Save Personalization and in less than 10 minutes, you'll have your very own Google.
Each service can be edited later on (for example, if you want 9 news instead of 3 from Slashdot, you can do it with two clicks, without accessing the upper menu) with the help of some Edit links.
Google will try to maintain an organized layout by displaying these services in three almost equal columns. If you don't like equal columns, then Drag&Drop to arrange the services as you like. As if we weren't already impressed, the drag&drop thing blew us away.
Currently, you cannot define other news sources and you cannot add new services like: Froogle, Blogger or Images, which would have been very useful. Any interesting option would have been the ability to choose other sources for Quote and Word of the Day.
The possibility to choose a certain channel from Google News to be displayed is another useful feature.
As every Google creation, Google Fusion works perfectly on every browser we tested the service on: Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera and Netscape 8.0.
It's also possible that in a future version, Google Fusion will allow the inclusion of other services and will offer the user more possibilities to edit and organize.
In conclusion, kudos to Google for letting us have our own personalized Google.com.
| Article rating: |
|
Good (3.5/5) |
7 vote(s) |
|
|
|
|
User opinions: |
 No user comments yet.  Be the first to express your opinion using the form below! |
