In a recent post in Yahoo's Search Blog, the topic of information is discussed. Yahoo has made it their "mission to empower people to find information" and personalization of the Yahoo! Search home page is at the heart of this effort. As you might expect, Yahoo is not alone in the quest to put information at your fingertips. Rivals Google and Microsoft offer home page customization as well, enabling users to retrieve desired information as conveniently as possible.

The home pages offer communication tools like email, chat, and calendars, but the essence of personalized home pages is a technology called Really Simple Sydication or RSS. The RSS protocol allows content to be distributed throughout the web quickly and easily. For example, news organization like the New York Times or the BBC use RSS to make their headlines available to any site on the web that supports RSS technology. The same is true for any other type of content, like weather forecasts, stock quotes, traffic information, and virtually any other kind of information you can imagine. Take a look at some of the RSS offerings available for your Google or Yahoo! home pages. Content providers can make their RSS feeds available to users of these customized search home pages by simply filling out a form.

The result of this customization is a personal information portal that delivers information to the user more easily than ever. If you use these engines, then take the time to customize your home page! You'll enjoy receiving the information that interests you in such a convenient format.

Obviously, the type of RSS feeds and other information a particular user chooses to display on their home page is a reflection of that user's interests and personality. The search engine companies can use these choices to create a user profile, which will enable them to serve up more relevant advertisements on their search pages. Although I'm not sure to what extent this is already being employed by the engines, it seems like a great way to market products to a more relevant audience. We don't usually like the idea of too many ads being displayed, but wouldn't you prefer to see an ad about something that might interest you? My point of view is that if I'm going to be presented with an advertisement, I would rather see a relevant ad.

Search engine personalization has evolved over the last few years, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve as we move further into the information age. I'll be watching with interest as new features are made available.

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