Google Launching New Recommendations Features For Toolbar, Homepage

Google is launching right now two new Search History-based features which look really cool. I had the opportunity to talk to Sepandar Kamvar, Google’s personalization lead, about the new stuff on Monday, and here’s what I learned.

The first new feature is for the personalized homepage. Create a new “magic tab” called Recommendations (create new tab, name it exactly that, and leave checked the “I’m Feeling Lucky” box), and you’ll get a page filled with Gadgets that offer various categories of recommendations, based on other people who searched for the same things you did. Take a look:
The Gadgets on the page are:

* Searches - recommends Google News and Google Web searches, based on your search history, and showing some pages from those searches it things you might be interested in.
* Groups - recommends Google Groups. This may not be ready by the time the feature is announced, I am told.
* Gadgets - recommends Google Personalized Homepage Gadgets you might want to install.
* Videos - recommends Google Video and YouTube videos you might want to watch. You can watch them right in the Gadget.
* Pages - recommends web pages you might be interested in based on your Search History.
* News - recommends news stories you might be interested in based on your Search History.

This is a well-designed homepage tab that you can grab very easilly, thanks to the magic tab feature. You can load it up, decide which tabs you like most, and get rid of any that aren’t for you. If you want more, the Pages and News Gadgets can replace the Searches Gadget and give similar info, and if you want less, get rid of those two and just use the Searches Gadget.

The other new feature is a really cool new Custom Button for the Google Toolbar. The button, based on your Search History and requiring you to be logged in, gives you every day fifty websites it has picked that it thinks you might like. Fifty new sites, every day, and you just click the button, get a new one, then click it again, and again, and again. Such a great way to browse when bored or curious.

They call it “search without actually searching”, presenting you information Google believes you to be interested in without you issuing a query. To use it, you’ll need the Google Toolbar installed, and it needs to be a recent edition that supports the wonderful Custom Buttoms feature. Currently, both the Internet Explorer and Firefox toolbars (and the Enterprise Toolbar for IE) support Custom Buttons, so you just need a recent version and you can use it on Windows, the Mac, or Linux.

The Customer Buttons feature works based on XML files, so I asked if this feature could possibly be used as a browser bookmarklet, URL, or just as a custom web page feature. As I was told, the “functionality of the button does not work without the toolbar”, but hopefully someone will be able to look into the XML and figure out what is possible. I use Opera, which has no Google Toolbar, but I’d love to be able to use this feature, maybe find some really amazing new websites. A real killer ability would be if the 50 pages list could be output as an RSS feed.

Anyway, that’s the whole story. I love what Google’s personalization guys are doing, creating some really useful features and making opting into Search History incredibly useful. Especially with my favorite Findory on its last legs, I’m really hoping Google is stepping into the void with these great personalization features. They’d better not let up, because the more, the better for everybody