After last week's column about the new search engine A9.com, which takes Google's results and offers some personalization features, several readers wrote in to point out Google's own work-in-progress attempt at a personalized web search.
Google Personalized isn't as advanced as A9, but it's got some interesting features A9 doesn't have. Plus it doesn't record your search history, so if you're uncomfortable with that element of A9.com, you might prefer Google Personalized.
Google Personalized search delivers search results based on a profile you create describing your interests. Just go to http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html and pick the categories and subcategories you're interested in. They range from Movies to Physics, but are still fairly general.
For example, set your profile to Health and then search for "virus" and you'll get information about the West Nile virus first. Otherwise, a general Google search puts computer virus links first.
One cool feature is that your results can be instantly rearranged by dragging a slider at the top of the page to go from no personalization to full personalization or anywhere in between. "Google has developed new algorithms that dynamically reorder results by weighting the interests you enter in your profile," the site says. So when you move the slider, it recalculates and rearranges the results to add more or less emphasis on your profile information.
Unlike A9.com, which stores your information with your Amazon login and password, the Google Personalized profile is stored in a small file (a "cookie") on your computer, which you can delete at any time by clearing your temporary Internet files. This gives you more privacy than A9.com, but the downside is you can only access the information from one computer.
Thanks to Richard Lusk and New Hampshire Public Radio producer Tai Freligh for suggesting Google Personalized.
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