This afternoon the GMail team announced the addition of a new feature in the Gmail Labs - a Task Manager, or to do list. It's quite an elegant little feature, when it and the rest of GMail work. Below we've got a two minute video tour that shows how the feature works, in case Gmail is down for you and you can't see it for yourself!

Do you foresee yourself using this?

Google has also updated the iGoogle interface and a number of content providers have updated their gadgets to make better use of the canvas view as well.

The Gmail gadget now allows you to perform some of the most common email tasks, including actions like send or reply to messages without having to leave the iGoogle page (though you can also launch the full Gmail client from iGoogle).

Google Reader Integration

iGoogle now makes use of Google Reader's interface for browsing your RSS feeds. Thanks to this, iGoogle users can now share items directly from iGoogle and browse through their feeds just like they would in the regular Google Reader.

Other Updates: No More Tabs

Google has also made some changes to the iGoogle interface. The tabs at the top of the page have now been replaced with a navigation bar on the left side of the screen, for example. This is especially useful if you use a lot of gadgets that make use of the canvas view.

Some content providers like the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also updated their gadgets to make use of the full-screen canvas view.

It's all About the Canvas

Google is clearly positioning iGoogle as a one-stop resource for all Google products. So far, it shared its fate with most other similar services like Netvibes. It was a good homepage for your browser, but the gadgets and widgets on the site didn't provide enough functionality to keep you coming back during the day. Now, iGoogle is basically becoming an interface to the rest of Google's product line and has instantly become far more useful.

Here is our interview, with questions derived from a number of the R/WW authors:

R/WW: In a general sense, do you think privacy is less important now than it used to be - due to the popularity of social networks and social software? Because it does seem that to achieve true personalization, some sacrifices need to be made in terms of privacy (note: we're not getting at Google here, but in terms of web technology it is a noticeable trend these days).

Sep: Even despite the current trends, it is incredibly important to design products with the utmost respect for user data and we do this in the following ways:

2. Transparency. For those users who opt in to the Web History product, we show them their previous queries, so that our users can see all the data that is used to personalize their search results.

3. Control. Our Web History users have the ability to pause Web History at any time, or go back and delete individual items.

4. Data Portability. Our Web History users can export their web history data to another service through an RSS feed.

R/WW: In May at the Google Personalization Workshop, you mentioned that Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person. How far away is a 'Personal PageRank' system for mainstream (Mom and Pop) people, who may not have a Google Account yet and are probably a long way off using iGoogle? Is an Account necessary, or can PageRank be personalized in other ways, without Mom and Pop even realizing it perhaps?

Sep: We have various levels of personalization. For those who are signed up for Web History, we have the deepest personalization, but even for those who are not signed up for Web History, we personalize your results based on what country you are searching from. As we move forward, personalization will continue to be a gradient; the more you share with Google, the more tailored your results will be.

To answer your question as to whether Mom and Pop would realize it, it's important for us to be transparent about what we're using to personalize your search results, and we will continue to strive towards that as we increase the levels of personalization in search.

R/WW: Does Google use the information gleaned from GMail to improve the targeting of search ads, or even the branding?

Sep: No, we don't use GMail for personalization of search or search ads.

R/WW: Is personalization really a problem in search? Doesn't the context of the query give the information that the search engine needs?

Sep: Peter Fleischer's article in the Financial Times gives a nice rundown of some examples of when personalization is useful. [Ed: Peter Fleischer is global privacy counsel for Google]

R/WW: A few people in the comments for this week's Read/WriteWeb poll mentioned that Google's personalized search ended up just giving them the same results over and over again, which wasn't helpful for them. In other words, they wanted to search for new things, not things they'd already found previously. This may explain why 9% of poll respondents say personalized search has given them worse results. Do you have any explanation or response to those people?

Sep: That's interesting feedback. Giving the user a diverse set of results for a query is important to us, and for this reason we have tended towards making the effects of personalization subtle. Most of the individual rankings changes that we do at Google (both in personalization and outside of personalization) have an effect that's not highly perceptible to our users as a large change.

In terms of the specific concern as to whether personalization would give them the same results repeatedly, this is a reasonable concern, which is why the majority of our algorithms aren't simply boosting those results that you've seen before, but rather taking into account things like your location and your interest in order to give results that are both relevant to your query and to you.

R/WW: Thank you Sep for the interview.

Note: photo is via Google Blogoscoped

It wouldn't truly be "Google Personalization" week if we didn't talk about iGoogle. After all, it is the epitome of personalization for Google. It was their fastest growing product in 2006 and is available in 40 countries and 26 languages. Formerly known as Google Personalized Homepage or the abbreviated Google IG, iGoogle is a personalized AJAX start page.

Much like its close rivals Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, you do not need an account to gain initial access to the default start page. Immediately, you are thrown into the mix. You are able to edit, drag, drop, add, delete, expand, or collapse to your heart's desire. But once you are set on using the service, you will need to register or log into your Google account to save your settings. Doing so will allow you to access this personalized start page from any computer once logged in.

Next, you may want to choose a theme and/or color palette for your page. Initial default content will fill your screen based on your location. In my case, CBC News headlines and TSN sports tidbits occupied the space, as I am located in Canada. Other popular "gadgets" (a.k.a. widgets) populate the rest of the space. These may include horoscope, weather, as well date and time, to name a few.

Adding Content

Specific content can be added via a URL or RSS feed. Google also offers a list of categories to choose from. A simple one-click system facilitates the process for new users. The categories include:

• Popular
• News
• Tools
• Communication
• Fun & Games
• Finance
• Sports
• Lifestyle
• Technology
• New stuff

As a side note, I found a bit of bias toward Google content. In other words, it seemed that the YouTube and Gmail gadgets (among others) were more prominently positioned than some of the non-Google content.

Personalizing Your Page

Once you're satisfied with the content you've added, you can begin personalizing your page. You can move things around or delete any unwanted content. You can even edit individual gadgets. For example: if you are displaying a feed, you can customize it so that you only see the most recent item, or as many as the 9 most recent items.

Collapsing or expanding gadgets will provide better use of the page space. Doing so with the individual blog posts or news feeds is also a great way to catch up on the news and save time. However, some content providers do not provide full feeds. Others tack on ads at the end of full feeds to provide some incoming revenue.

With gadgets still in mind, iGoogle also:

• Provides recommendations to similar content.
• Enables you to learn more about the content source.
• Allows you to share with a friend.

You will also notice that Google makes excellent use of tabs. Think Firefox. You can create a tab based on a specific topic, area of interest, or category. These ensure that you will not need to scroll down your start page for hours in order to find a given piece of content. Subsequently, tabs can either be renamed, shared, or deleted.

Conclusion

AJAX start pages becoming very popular. Though iGoogle may lack some of the functionality and features of the space leaders mentioned above (most notably a more intuitive set-up process), I found the service loads and operates much faster. All in all, however, I was a bit disappointed by the overall service. I guess I've just come to expect demand a lot from Google. This offering was simple and clean, but nothing revolutionary or ground-breaking. I commend them on a job well done, but expect bigger things in future iterations.

With that in mind, it's curious that just under half (48%) of respondents in this week's R/WW poll haven't noticed any difference in their Google search results. Only 12% have seen an improvement, but perhaps of more concern is that 9% say their search results have gotten worse! You can test this yourself by going to googlonymous, which as the name suggests allows you to do an anonymous search on Google (hat tip Mind Booster Noori for the link).

Let us know your thoughts on the effectiveness of Google Personalized Search. Don't forget also to contribute to our poll on this topic:

Google has received much attention, not all of it positive, for its efforts to personalize search.

In this article, I will briefly describe personalized search, why Google and other search engines are trying to do personalized search, the approach Google is taking toward personalized search, and other approaches to personalized search.

What is personalized search?

Personalized search is showing different search results to different people. Personalized search uses each searcher's past behavior to try to understand intent and what is relevant to that searcher.

It is true that a search for [java] is ambiguous. What do you want when you search for [java]? Are you a programmer looking for the Java documentation from Sun? Are you looking for a summary of the Java programming language from Wikipedia? Are you someone who wants the Java download so you can run a Java applet? Or maybe you are planning a trip to Indonesia?

Your past behavior may help the search engine figure out what you want. If you previously searched about Indonesia, that tells it one thing. If you searched for [java sdk] two days ago, that indicates something else.

Personalized search shows different results to different people based on their past behavior. Personalized search tries to disambiguate intent by using information not only about what you are doing now, but also what you did in the past.

Why do personalized search?

Search engines are trying to make search results more useful. They want to help people find the information they want faster.

Search engines help searchers find what we need faster by trying to put the most relevant results for our searches at the top of the page, a process known as relevance ranking.

However, different people are interested in different results. What a geek likes is quite a bit different than what that geek's mother considers relevant.

Right now, geek and geek mother see the same results when we search on most search engines. The relevance rank is generic, trying to order the results to what is most useful to the average user - ignoring individual needs.

The generic relevance rank continues to improve, but each improvement seems to be getting harder and harder to find. At some point, the only way get further improvements, to help people find what they need faster, is to individualize the relevance rank.

Google gets serious about personalization; Pic by christophercarfi

Even early steps toward personalized search could make a substantial difference. Search engines currently treat each search as independent, so what you just searched for does not matter in terms of what you see on your next search.

But, someone who searches for [indonesia] and then [java] likely has different interests than someone who searches for [applet] and then [java]. What you just wanted is often helpful to determine what you want now.

While concerns about the privacy implications of storing and using past behavior are real, personalized search likely is inevitable. Different people have different perceptions of relevance. To help searchers find what they need, to deal with differing intent, different searchers will need to see different search results.

Google Personalized Search

Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. A 2002 paper, "Scaling Personalized Web Search", describes the technique invented by Kaltix.

The basic idea is to create many different relevance ranks, each tailored to the interests of a group of people. When executing a search, Google uses the shards of the index organized for the tastes of people like me to rank my results.

How it works was easily visible in an early version of Google Personalized Search. Users checked off a boxes corresponding to interests (e.g. "computers" and "architecture") and then Google would bias all future searches toward those interests. An early version of Google Custom Search (previously known as "site-flavored search") also was based on Kaltix technology and allowed people to put a search box on their site that would be biased towards a specific category (e.g. "Computers/Internet").

The current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it is all implicit. The current Google Personalized Search likely is using the same Kaltix technology, building a high-level profile of you, then biasing all of your search results based on your long-term behavior.

Other ways to do personalized search

Google's personalized search is not the only way to do personalized search. Google uses high-level profiles learned implicitly from your long-term search history.

Rather than use a high-level profile (e.g. an interest in "computers"), personalized search could be fine-grained - based on your specific actions. For example, specific results you have seen in the past could be featured (known as re-finding). Results related to results you have clicked on in the past could be featured. Results you have seen before on other queries could be hidden. Results for similar or related searches to your past searches could influence your current results.

Rather than learning implicitly, personalized search could be explicit. For example, you could specify categories of interest, much like the old personalized search. Or, you could explicitly rate web pages. Or, you could explicitly share search results or favorites with friends (like on Yahoo MyWeb).

Rather than using long-term history, personalized search could focus on what you are doing right now. For example, if you refine a search, starting with [indonesia], then [java], the first could influence the second without keeping any long-term summary of your overall interests.

There may be some disadvantages to the approach Google is using for personalized search. For example, using long-term, high-level profiles means that the search engine can shift results slightly toward general preferences, but it cannot make immediate changes based on what a searcher is doing right now. In particular, it cannot help much when searchers are on a mission, doing a series of related searches, but not finding what they want.

Conclusion

Personalized search allows a search engine to show different people different search results based on their past behavior. It disambiguates intent using information from the past, allowing the engine to cater to differing perceptions of relevance.

Personalized search is an early step from generic search tools towards individualized assistants. Personalized search is part of a shift from information retrieval to information discovery.

One day perhaps, we will have a search engine that not only helps us find the information we seek, but also helps us discover information we could not have found on our own. One day perhaps, a search engine will not only help us find information, but also help us process and understand it.

Greg Linden is the founder of Findory and author of the blog Geeking with Greg.

We mentioned in our Half-Year Web Technology Report that Google has impressed so far in 2007, on both the acquisition front and building up its own technology. Equally impressive is that Google is not sitting back and letting the hundreds of alternative search engines overtake them in technology. Often incumbent tech companies are content to sit on their market position and so they don't innovate much further. However Google has busily been experimenting with, and implementing into its main search properties, new types of personalization.

In January we ran a poll asking which "Search 2.0" approaches stood the best chance of beating Google. Personalized Search was the option that got the most votes. Also our interview with Google's Matt Cutts revealed that Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot over the past year or so.

Google Accounts Personalized

Back in February we noted that Google was ramping up its personalization efforts via Google Accounts. When you're signed in to Google Accounts, said the Google blog, you'll "have access to a personalized Google - one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage." Matt Cutts mentioned it in a post too and linked to external analysis on the personalization theme.

I had noticed it earlier, via Google Accounts. I'd spotted the following message in the Google Accounts Help:

"What does it mean for Google to be more personalized with Google Accounts?

When you're signed in to Google Accounts, you'll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you'll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets."

So at that point Google was beginning to integrate its various personalization efforts more. Currently when you go to the Google Accounts frontpage, you are told that you can "customize pages, view recommendations, and get more relevant search results" when you login.

iGoogle, Localization, Gadget Maker

In May there was a Google Personalization Workshop, which gave more details of Google's push into personalization.

In the workshop the new name for Google Personalized Homepage was revealed - iGoogle. Also shown off at the workshop was Gadget Maker, location-based personalized search results and a “My Community” service for the iGoogle directory.

In regards to its personalized homepage, Google has always had far more gadgets available on its platform than live.com, Netvibes or Pageflakes. As of May there were over 25,000 different Google gadgets. Also according to Jessica Ewing at the May event, product manager of the Google Personalized Homepage program, iGoogle was the fastest growing product at Google in 2006.

Some useful background to Google's personalization efforts, from a Google Blogoscoped post in May:

"Why does Google invest in a “personal Google” now? Sep [Kamvar, from Google] says it’s because of recent trends in content on the web, and recent technological advances in search algorithms. He suggests that Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person, so to speak. Sep explains that Google thinks of personalization in 3 parts:

• Search Your own stuff (like Google Desktop Search, Web History)
• Traditional (Pull) Search
• Push Search (like recommendations, iGoogle/ personalized homepage)"

Privacy Concerns?

Google goes out of its way to ensure that the user is still "in charge" of the personalization experience, no doubt to keep the privacy hounds at bay. Apart from needing to be logged into your Google Account, Google also makes personalization optional - including giving the user the ability to pause the Web History feature or remove specific items from the history. Users can also export their Web History as an RSS feed, which is important given that the ability to export one's data has long been a key issue for 'open Web' advocates.

We'll take a closer look at privacy issues in one of our feature posts this week.

Conclusion

Google seems to be fighting a two-pronged battle with their personalization efforts - one is to keep themselves ahead of the alt search engine pack, and the other is to one-up Yahoo, Microsoft, Netvibes, Pageflakes and the other personalized start page contenders.

I still think Google has much to do in terms of innovation in search personalization - take a look at Collarity or Hakia as just two examples of alt search engines with innovative personalization approaches. But the Google Account (which is where much of this personalization in Google products is coming from) and the new iGoogle features show that Google is pushing forward in search innovation - certainly they are not resting on their considerable laurels!

Over the next 5 days we'll investigate Google's personalization efforts more. I hope you enjoy the Read/WriteWeb Files this week!