For example, a standard search for "restaurants" (without quotes), will return several large, well-known sites among first 5 results. These include restaurants.com, zagat.com, restaurantrow.com, official Subway corporate site, and Yahoo restaurants directory. But let's say you've selected Texas as a geographic area of interest in your personalization profile. Move personalization slide all way to right on same search, and now top 5 results are from guidelive.com , Landrysseafood.com, Houston Citysearch, and Austin360, followed by restaurants.com . Each of your personalized results are marked with small spheres of red, blue, and yellow.

There are many personalization topics to choose from, including Arts, Business, Computers, Health, and many other categories which can be further narrowed.

The process to create a group is fast and painless. Just create your group's name and email address, and invite your members to join. You are able to make your group either public or private, and Google has provided a new interface so that you can see your group's postings sorted any of several different ways. The Beta 2 Google Groups also features dynamic conversations, with both Usenet and mailing list postings created within 10 seconds, and indexed within 10 minutes from post.

Families, old college running buddies, online communities, and many others may find benefit in using Google Groups, and Beta 2 release is worth a try.