Thursday, May 19, 2005

Google Factory Tour slides

Google has a long webcast of their "Factory Tour" meeting today.

If you're short of time like me, you might just skim the slides. Like I did for the recent shareholders meeting, I put the slides all together for quick consumption here.

It's a long presentation, 165 slides. Whew. I like slide #131, the ultimate search engine.

Starting on slide 156, it appears Marissa Mayer will be announcing a new product in Google Labs, a customizable version of the Google.com home page.

The product doesn't appear to have launched yet, though I assume it will later this afternoon. It appears to be similar to My Yahoo in that you can stick little widgets on your Google home page for news and other Google content.

Update: The customizable Google home page has launched at http://www.google.com/ig. Pretty simple. A few checkboxes for plopping a small selection of content like headlines from BBC and Google News underneath the Google search box. Useful, but limited. I assume they will be expanding this over time.

Update: John Battelle gives a little more context and says, "This is an all out response to the success of Yahoo and others in the personalized/RSS space." I see it more as Google dipping a toe in the water, but it's true that My Yahoo and others should be concerned and looking for new ways to keep ahead of Google.

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