iGoogle

Your homepage, back when you had one

Shut down
19902026

iGoogle was Google's customisable homepage, launched in May 2005: weather, news, mail and thousands of user-built gadgets arranged on your personal start page. Once one of Google's fastest-growing products, it was retired on 1 November 2013 as smartphones made the morning homepage ritual obsolete.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. May 2005 Launch
    Google Personalized Homepage launches

    Widgets and feeds on a personal start page.

  3. 2007
  4. 30 April 2007 Rebrand
    Renamed iGoogle

    Themes and a booming gadget directory follow.

  5. 2008
  6. 2008 Peak
    One of Google's fastest-growing products

    The default morning page for millions.

  7. 2012
  8. 3 July 2012 Shutdown announced
    Retirement announced

    Sixteen months of notice; users petition to save it.

  9. 2013
  10. 1 November 2013 Shutdown
    iGoogle shuts down

    The personalized homepage era ends.

The site through time

Browse google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2005–2013 Founded

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google retired iGoogle on 1 November 2013, saying the need for it had "eroded over time" with modern apps on Chrome and Android.

Our analysis: The personalized homepage was a desktop-web idea: one page you opened every morning. Phones replaced that ritual with home screens and notifications, and Google had no reason to keep a gadget platform alive for a habit that was dying.

History [edit]

The morning page

Launched in May 2005 as the Google Personalized Homepage and renamed iGoogle in 2007, it let anyone assemble their own start page: Gmail preview, weather, RSS feeds, a to-do list, Sudoku, and eventually tens of thousands of third-party gadgets, wrapped in artist-designed themes. For millions of people, especially in offices and schools, iGoogle literally was the internet's front door; you opened the browser and your day was laid out.

It was, for a time, one of Google's fastest-growing products, and its gadget platform was an early experiment in what would later be called an app ecosystem.

The door nobody opens anymore

Smartphones dismantled the habit. The things iGoogle aggregated (mail, weather, news, games) became apps with icons and push notifications; the browser start page stopped being anyone's morning ritual. Google announced the retirement on 3 July 2012 with sixteen months of notice, pointing users toward Chrome apps and Android widgets. Petitions gathered tens of thousands of signatures anyway. On 1 November 2013 iGoogle went dark, and the personalised-homepage era, which had also claimed My Yahoo and Netvibes' relevance, effectively closed with it.

Similar projects

GeoCities Your neighborhood on the early web 1994–2009 Delicious The web's shared memory 2003–2017 Google Reader The web, in one place 2005–2013 Adobe Flash The plugin that animated the web 1996–2020 Google Wave Email, reinvented too hard 2009–2012 goo.gl Google's link shortener, and the day old links died 2009–2025

Sources [edit]

  1. Google To Discontinue iGoogle, Once Google's Fastest Growing Product Search Engine Land 3 July 2012 [archived]
  2. iGoogle is now Closed The Next Web 1 November 2013

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).