Google Goes Personal, Is Orkut Integration Next?

Google has launched some new services into its search routines. The Google Personalized service. To use the service, user's must first create a simple profile which involves the selection of categories of interest. Once completed, users perform a search and filter their results.

The system makes use of a slider along the top that throttles the personalization effect -- by default the filtering is minimized. Increasing the slider seems to show/hide different results. As it turns out, by looking at the underlying code, the system makes use of some Javascript to load and unload the items. More results are returned than shown on the page and selectively shown. Don't let the smooth slider fool you, though. There's only 9 actual levels from what I can tell.

Of course, this categorization is fairly limited in nature. One can only wonder when all that other data they've started amassing on the user will be put to "good" use.