Google bungs 'œcelebrity' zing into iGoogle

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 04 June 2009 16:11

Opinion and Analysis

With all the Google launches of this week and last, co-incidentally right at the same time Microsoft has launched its new Bing search engine, Google has also gone Squared, and has surrounded itself with celebrity star power!
A new and “green” Australian Googleplex, Google Wave, the switch-on of Google Squared (which can organise information a bit like Wolfram Alpha), updates to the Australian iGoogle service, and now a host of celebrities sharing their iGoogle pages – Google really has been busy this week!

Google Squared, according to Google, “is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet”.

Rather than using its own special database of information, as with Wolfram Alpha, Google is using all of the information on the Internet as its source of data, and it shows that Google is, like its competitors, thinking of the future and improving search, with more details here from the Google Blog.

Although Australia has just received an iGoogle update, the world has received one too, as explained in another part of Google’s very big blog.

Google is letting the rest of us mere mortals take a peek at how a range of “celebrities” have set up their customised iGoogle pages, and use whichever of their gadgets or designs you’d like on your own iGoogle page – and naturally, it’s all free.

These celebs are gathered up in the “iGoogle Showcase”, where Google explains that “30 preeminent people, including Dave Matthews, Rachael Ray and Katie Couric, are sharing their iGoogle pages with you in full so you can get a glimpse into their interests and how they experience the web.

I had a look through a range of the celebrities’ iGoogle pages, and added a range of gadgets that some had used on their pages to my own – a couple from the “Four Hour Work Week” author Tim Ferris were quite interesting, as were some from Tim Brown of IDEO. 

Google explains that you might, for example, “select Al Gore's iGoogle page for his preferred theme and gadgets for keeping up on the latest media news, supporting the Alliance for Climate protection cause or browsing through photos from National Geographic.”

There’s Ryan Seacrest and his very entertainment focused gadgets to choose from, Donald Trump and his business oriented gadgets, some of which dispense general business advice, are on offer, Martha Stewart predictably shares her recipes and tips, while Deepak Chopra’s main contribution beyond things like Amazon or the New York Times is a link to articles from his blog, with several more celebrities to visit and choose from, should anything appeal.

Google gets cute by noting that: “we've all heard about "six degrees of separation," but now, some of your favorite stars are just a few clicks away.”

As Google says, we’re really only getting a glimpse into the true tastes and preferences of the celebrities on offer, but it is an interesting way for the people in the showcase to share some more of themselves with their fans.

It seems obvious that there’ll be more additions to the showcase in the future, but until then, what was it that some other sort-of big company launched in… um... searching for... er… stuff online this week?