I accessed my “Google Personnalized Homepage” today morning only to discover that the page logo now displays iGoogle instead of the classic and usual Google… I was wondering what it was, as the logo is not clickable with a link to an explanation as I hoped it would be …
I quickly tried a search in Google itself about iGoogle, but didn’t really get a relevant explanation to this renaming… then I decided to try a search on Technorati.
Technorati is a more or less a search engine too, but it is specifically dedicated to blogs, and I guessed that bloggers would have been quick to post about this renaming… and I was right ! If you look at the chart on the right, you’ll see that the number of posts containing iGoogle drastically increased between yesterday and today… (you can get an actualized chart on Technorati)
Turned out that I didn’t find exactly what triggered that renaming, but seems like it was more or less to be expected (iGoogle is what was the ig standing for in the personnalized home page URL http://www.google.com/ig) but there are two lessons to learn from this :
- As soon as Google does something, even the most unimportant ones, it immediately triggers a wave of blog posts because of the geek factor carried by Google (and am I not blogging about it right now ?)
- When you try to get a real time coverage about an event, you might have more chance to find out with blogs search engines than with Google. Blogs indexing are close to real time, and bloggers have a quick reponse time. Classical search engines on the other hand, usually take some time before indexing new contents, making it unsuitable for real time answers.
Update : this has been covered in yesterday article about iGoogle on TechCrunch.