Rebrand & New Features: Google IG To Relaunch as iGoogle

Google’s personalized home page, Google IG, has been rebranded as iGoogle and will relaunch tomorrow at igoogle.com. A number of bloggers were brought in to Google HQ today and are reporting the details.

iGoogle is Google’s entrant into the crowded customizable Ajax home page space, where My Yahoo is the clear leader with over 50 million monthly unique visitors. iGoogle currently has just over 7 million monthly unique visitors.

But Google has never promoted iGoogle, and it has a number of superior features to MyYahoo. The most important is that Google’s personalized home page supports widgets (they call them gadgets). Yahoo has stubbornly refused to integrate the My Yahoo property with their Konfabulator widgets platform. Through Google widgets, users can bring Gmail, Gtalk and other services right to their home page. Finally, Google allows users to customize the template of iGoogle – they say that 30% of users choose to do this.

Google is now offering a “personalized home” link on their main home page, which will drive significant numbers of new users to the site. Look out, Yahoo.