Monday, May 25, 2009

Search Engine Portal Pages, RSS - Feeds, iGoogle


Many of us who work online stay busy. Casual surfing of news can be time consuming, so what better way than to use a customized portal at one of your favorite search engines. For the more well-known search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, one needs usually an ID associated with the search engine and to be logged in order to customize the pages to your liking.

For years, I had used Yahoo!'s customizations for my own portal page. I believe I started using it around 2003. Since that time, the onslaught of Web 2.0 infrastructure has vastly changed the landscape of a customized search engine portal page.

I am showing an screen capture of one of my Gmail accounts I use for infosecurity news, general news and spam related news. Being logged into my GMail account, and using Seamonkey as a browser, this allows me to customize your own iGoogle page. I munged my GMail account at the top. iGoogle works fine with the Firefox browser as well. You can also have your GMail inbox on the portal page showing the newest emails you have received. For this particular GMail account, I rarely use the email function as it is spam-ridden. I can pick out which ever news source you like best. On the top left of the graphic, I chose a great anti-spam blog called I Kill Spammers.

So you can add your favorite blogger blogs or probably most any other type of blog out there to your own customized portal page. You can easily drag and drop categories. At the top right, I have Slashdot stories. I am a nerd, so Slashdot is for me to read most days.

I have the weather on mine as well, but it is near the bottom, so it is not seen in that particular graphic. I pick out the weather from some different places just out of my own curiosity.



I believe the coding behind a lot of this is written in AJAX and is embedded into RSS feeds. Some people take their portal pages seriously, especially when Google makes occasional changes design-wise. I tend to keep mine somewhat simplified to where they almost look like a default Google page.

I haven't used Yahoo's portal page much in a while now, maybe I can go back and make it more to my liking. I don't think I have updated my Yahoo portal page in 2 years or so now. I would venture to guess Yahoo is probably trying to play catchup with Google, so maybe Yahoo's portal page deserves a second chance.

What are your favorite search engine portal pages? And if you use them, how do you customize yours?

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posted by my0p @ 5:29 PM

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