April 2007 Recap: Towards a More Personalized Google

In April, Google launched a Mac version for Google Desktop and a directory assistance service. Google also made its biggest acquisition: an advertising company called DoubleClick that will help Google increase its footprint in display advertising.

Google also bought Tonic Systems, a small company focused on creating PowerPoint tools in Java, and announced the addition of a presentation web application to Google Docs. Google Spreadsheets finally added charts, although you can't import or export files that include charts yet, and Google Docs is closer to a wiki system.

The concept of personalization was pushed further by expanding the search history to all the visited web pages and by showing more recommendations as a benefit of the privacy trade-off. Google Personalized Homepage became iGoogle and added new features that could transform it into a social network.

Google Search started to include results from Google News, Open Office documents get the same treatment as Microsoft Office files, and there are new experimental layouts that might replace the current interface of Google.

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All the posts from April