Google delivers pretty
good results when
you type your query
into the search box
and mash Enter, but
our power-user tips
will make anyone a
Google master in just
15 minutes!
Google Personalized Search tries to make
your search results more relevant by taking
into consideration what you’ve searched for
in the past and what results you’ve clicked
on. Go to http://google.com/psearch to try it
out. You need a Google account to use it,
and your search history will be stored inside
your account so that Personalized Search
can work whenever you’re logged in. If you
want to remove any sensitive items from your
search history, log in to your account and
click Search History, which is at the top of the
Google homepage.
Also on this page, you can attain a deeper
understanding of your Web behavior—and
thus your inner self—by clicking Trends to
display some revealing statistics. You can
also browse through things that you’ve
searched for and clicked in the past and
make bookmarks for your favorite sites.G
oogle has an answer for everything these days. Even its humble search
box is stocked with exciting capabilities that can be unleashed by learn-
ing a few simple tricks. If you need to do simple math or convert a cur-
rency, distance, or weight, the search box should be your first port of call.
Yet there’s so much more to Google than the familiar search screen, and
best of all, everything’s free. If the website you need is down, Google can
help. A vast, searchable library of books is available for your perusal. Docs
and Spreadsheets is an online office package that enables you to chat with
others in real time while working collaboratively on documents—and your
work can be saved on Google’s servers, so you can access it from anywhere.
Many of the new projects Google is working on are available for anyone
to try out in the Labs section of the Google site, http://labs.google.com/. Two
of the most entertaining are Trends, which enables you to look at search
trend data, and Suggest, which comes up with suggestions about what you
might want to search for as you type in the search box. A Google account
is necessary to play with a lot of these things, but all you need to do to get
one is provide an email address and password.Get More from Google
Personalized Search Trends
54 MAXIMUMPC FEBRUARY 2007
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Using Personalized Search, you can tweak your search history to deliver
more accurate results.