iGoogle's Demise May Toll The Bell For The Personalized Home Page

Brian Proffitt | ReadWrite | November 1, 2013

iGoogle is officially closed. Are personalized home pages far behind?

Google’s iGoogle home page service is no more. Despite protests from hordes of iGoogle users, the personalized home page vanished today, traveling to that great multi-colored Google place in the sky, leaving only a link that now redirects to Google's home page. And other personalized home pages might not be far behind.

iGoogle fell victim to one of the company's periodic round of service trimming, as Google general manager of global enterprise search Matt Eichner spelled out on Google’s official blog 16 months ago. At the time, Eichner explained that iGoogle was no longer necessary given new app-like interfaces within Google’s Chrome browser and the ChromeOS and Android platforms. The AJAX-based iGoogle used app-like widgets for users to organize and customize information on their iGoogle pages, and Google saw this as redundant.

“With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time, so we’ll be winding it down,” Eichner wrote.