iGoogle being retired in 2013

[cojak]

Most may not care but this has been central to my internet experience for many years. It's my homepage and is a point of recognition when I've logged on from all over the world.

I haven't needed to worry about the machine or the browser that I use as my most important bookmarks (not banks or anything, but places I go to a lot), news feeds and gadgets were there.

So now I'll have find another home page.

Rats.

[TimberWolf]

Same here. I use it for homepage, often used bookmarks, calendar/diary linked to my android, weather and google email. A bit like a widgets screen on a smartphone. I haven't looked into alternatives yet.

[doodab]

I use it too.

Is this the end of google?

[cojak]

No.

But it's the end of my relationship with Google. I think they're trying to tether people to Chrome, and while I do use Chrome as my main browser, most don't. And certainly not business.

So I'll have to find another homepage too.

[SimonMac]

No.

But it's the end of my relationship with Google. I think they're trying to tether people to Chrome, and while I do use Chrome as my main browser, most don't. And certainly not business.

So I'll have to find another homepage too.

Why not recreate its functionality your self? Its only book marks and RSS feeds

[doodab]

But it's the end of my relationship with Google.

But if IT "thought leaders" like you or I move away from google, and our friends and relatives follow, that will blow a massive hole in their user numbers.

I noticed they had been up my street with streetview as well. I felt violated.

Down with the googlians!

[cojak]

Why not recreate its functionality your self? Its only book marks and RSS feeds

That's what I'm thinking SM, just need to decide how and where to put it.

[SimonMac]

That's what I'm thinking SM, just need to decide how and where to put it.

Stick it in the public folder of dropbox, use a url masking site to give it a better url you can book mark as home on all your PC's

[jmo21]

There are many similar, I tried IG, but preferred Netvibes, been using that as my aggregator for years

[Gentile]

Most may not care but this has been central to my internet experience for many years. It's my homepage and is a point of recognition when I've logged on from all over the world.

I haven't needed to worry about the machine or the browser that I use as my most important bookmarks (not banks or anything, but places I go to a lot), news feeds and gadgets were there.

So now I'll have find another home page.

Rats.

Have you tried Duck-Duck Go? I got so fed up with the noisy and distracting ADHD-afflicted Google Doodles to commemorate how bored Google's developers were that day, the constantly-interrupting Google Instant suggestions-as-you-type, and the "I know Google Instant already wasted your time, but here's results for something you didn't search for anyway" you invariably get back once you've finally made it through Google Instant's dozens of 'suggestions' that I made a concerted effort to find an alternative search engine a year or so ago, and found Duck-Duck. If Bing didn't pull the same push marketing tricks as Google by second-guessing whilst you type and returning results that marketers would prefer you to be searching for, I'd have switched to them instead. There are ways to turn all of these irritants off of course (generally using a combination of Firefox Add-Ons like YesScript, and signing up for a Google account so that you can access preferences only available to signed up users, which of course is exactly what Google's marketers would love you to do), but I'd rather not have to constantly fight with a search engine just to get it to do the basic job it's meant to be doing.

Duck-Duck appealed, because it went back to the simple, uncluttered interface of Google circa 2003. It doesn't try to be cleverer than you, and it doesn't try to clumsily push marketed results in your face. It's got a slick mobile version too, which you can turn off, even if you're not an account holder with them. It's not great at local knowledge searches, tbh, but for purely work technical queries and global news it's a pleasant change from the big business funded main search engines. You can't easily use Google to search for peculiarly-spelled technical words, or foreign language words now; Duck-Duck's great for both of those.