Google has a truckload of new features on its main page today. It also introduced Personalized search. Since I’m at least partially interested in personalized searching (seeing as how my thesis was based on it and all), I tried it out. I created a profile with 3 or 4 favorite subjects and then started searching. I started playing around with the slider on the top of the page and lo behold! My personalized results started magically sliding upward. It’s always nice to your research project being closely imitated on Google.

A few quick questions, though…

• Shouldn’t your personalized results be part of the answer page right from the beginning of the search? As of now, completely new personalized results appear out of nowhere when you move the personalization slider. This seems to suggest that the personalized results are somehow not part of the initial text search. That doesn’t seem right to me. Personalized icons should appear beside your plain-text search when you begin moving the slider.

  (This is a Personalized icon: )

• You can also search for number ranges in Google now. Type in ‘Playstations $150-$170’ and you should be getting pages that sell Playstations from $150 – $170. Experiment Results??? Not so good. Too much noise in the results page.
• Froogle is now officially on the front page. Maybe the price range input would work well with Froogle? I tried that, and to my surprise… it doesn’t work AT ALL with Froogle!

My newest addiction… DingDongs — The satan-influenced evil sibling of ‘Pure Magic’ biscuits!