Google seems to think of iGoogle as an alternate but equal interface for the regular Google homepage. But that's not how I use it. I use iGoogle to catch up on everything that happened when I wasn't on the internet. I visit it only once or twice a day - when I get home from work or when I wake up in the morning - see what's going on at a glance, and then get on with my life. The problem is, once I go to iGoogle, when I go back to Google I have the iGoogle interface and have to switch back to the classic interface when I need just search. I simply don't need my search engine to be a portal all the time, just once or twice a day is fine. It might be useful to me at work if we were allowed recreational surfing (back when we were less heavily monitored I would compulsively check stuff for updates, whereas iGoogle could do the checking for me and it would show up whenever I go to google something), but as it stands it would just sit there and tease me with things I really shouldn't click on. And when I'm on iGoogle, I don't even use the search function, at all, ever, because that's not what I'm there for.
I want iGoogle to be considered a separate function, like Google Reader is. I want it to have its own button on my Google toolbar, and not interfere with my ordinary Google homepage that I use when I just want to search. Portal and search are different functions. They are not interchangeable. That's why I left Altavista, that's why I left Yahoo. Google, I love you, but please learn from your predecessors' mistakes.
2 comments:
Hm, interesting. I use iGoogle as my home page, the same way you do, to catch up on what I missed. I didn't like how long it took to load when I just wanted to search for something. (My previous home page was just classic Google search.)
But I didn't like the Google toolbar because it loaded all this extra shit on my computer w/o my permission. So I had uninstalled it a while back.
But b/c iGoogle took too long to load for a regular search, I put the toolbar back on, and the newer version let me customize it to get rid of all that stuff I didn't like.
So now I use iGoogle as my home page and the Google toolbar - with news, maps and images buttons - for search.
This doesn't work for you? Because why?
Partly because I've been using plain google as my homepage for nearly 10 years so I'm used to a clean page and find the clutter irritating when I don't need it. Partly because ever since that thing where the AOL searches were leaked I don't stay logged in unless I need to be, and a non-logged-in iGoogle is useless. And there's really nothing else that is useful to me as a homepage other than Google.
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