By Jakob Jelling
http://www.sitetube.com
Anyone who”s been on the net any time at all knows that
Google has been the search engine of choice for many for a
while now. Whether that continues remains to be seen, but for
now, with MSN still in development and Yahoo going through
some growing pains, many still feel that Google is the
leader. As such, it”s worth dropping in to the Google Labs
every now and then to see what”s going on there.
For example, Google”s Personalized search offers a fun and
useful way for searchers to interact with part of the
mysterious and closely-guarded Google search algorithm. You
can set a search profile that”s stored as a cookie on your
computer. The easy-to-use Google profile interface allows you
to pick specific topics that interest you. Once chosen and
saved, you can then do a search from the Personalized search
page. At first, you”ll see normal Google results. But at the
top of the page is a slider bar, and by moving this to the
right, those same search results will be dynamically altered
to narrow in to focus on your personalization settings.
For example, a standard search for “restaurants” (without the
quotes will return several large, well-known sites among
the first 5 results. These include restaurants.com, zagat.
com, restaurantrow.com, the official Subway corporate site,
and the Yahoo restaurants directory. But let”s say you”ve
selected Texas as a geographic area of interest in your
personalization profile. Move the personalization slide all
the way to the right on the same search, and now the top 5
results are from guidelive.com , Landrysseafood.com, Houston
Citysearch, and Austin360, followed by restaurants.com . Each
of your personalized results are marked with small spheres of
red, blue, and yellow.
There are many personalization topics to choose from,
including Arts, Business, Computers, Health, and many other
categories which can be further narrowed.
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