NEW YORK Google has introduced beta versions of a personalized Web search and a service that delivers search results via e-mail.
The two prototypes debuted yesterday on Google Labs (labs.google.com)—the Mountain View, Calif., search engine’s testing ground for ideas.
Google’s personalized Web search delivers custom search results based on profiles users create that describe their interests. For instance, outdoor enthusiasts will get different results than music lovers when they conduct a search on “bass.” Users can control the degree of personalization by dragging a slider at the top of the page.
With Google Web alerts, consumers can register to receive daily or weekly e-mails with links to online page results and top news stories related to keywords they specified. The service will let users follow the progress of a favorite sports team or a business competitor without having to perform searches repeatedly, for example.
The beta rollouts come as Microsoft’s MSN hurriedly tries to catch up in the red-hot search realm. Last Thursday at the MSN Strategic Account Summit in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed regret over not having developed an in-house search offering for MSN. Outsourcing search capabilities is “probably the thing I feel worse about,” he said [IQ Daily Briefing, March 25]. Inktomi and Overture, both owned by competitor Yahoo!, currently supply MSN’s algorithmic- and sponsored-search product, respectively.
The following day at the conference—attended by some 500 marketing, media and agency professionals—Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN Information Services and Merchant Platform, confirmed that MSN is planning to roll out an algorithmic search engine within the next 12 months. He also showcased MSN Newsbot and MSN Blogbot, products slated to launch during the same time frame.
The former is an automated news search service that will aggregate content from more than 4,200 global sources; it will focus on personalized content, recommending relevant links based on a user’s queries over time. The latter will present relevant Web logs, or blogs, to consumers in response to their search queries.
MSN is also working on what it calls “Answerbot,” which will return a natural-language factual answer in response to a consumer’s natural-language factual question.
Google Tests Personalized Search Services
