SubscribeSogou Joins Personal Start Page Game
Is personal start page the standard service of a search engine, as Google and Microsoft Windows Live? Sogou, the search engine of Sohu, think the answer is “Yes”, so they launched their i.Sogou service recently.
But, wait. After using it for one minute, I found that though i.Sogou service looks like a ajax-rich personal start page as Google IG or Netvibes, in fact it’s not. It does not support adding your own rss feeds or webservice widgets so far, so it means all the content and modules are fixed by Sogou’s editors already, you can only choose which modules to show or not, and drag modules to the places you want. It is just like a web 1.0 version of My Yahoo!, rather than a web 2.0 personal homepage. I understand that maybe they don’t want to make the service too geeky, but I think they should learn how to balance adoption of new technology and demand of mass users from new version of My Yahoo!.
Though i.Sogou is totally unimpressive, I found two things worth mentioning. First, for many modules in i.Sogou, the default content is from Sina, the direct rival of Sohu in China. Two, there is a blog search service which is powered by Sogou, so it may suggest that Sogou will launch its blog search service soon. According to my rough test, it seems Sogou’s blog search returns much more results than those of Baidu’s blog search and Qihoo’s blog search.
About a year ago, we found Netease was testing its ajax personal homepage, but one year later, it is still an experimental product. Other Chinese startups to pursuit opportunities in this market include Aiddi and Yatrack.cn.
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[...] Sogou began to test its personalized homepage, a new graduate of its lab. (Via CWR) You could extend or roll up each module and drag to re order it easily. A directory of websites is fixed on the left so it isn’t configuring completely. [...]