What Are GModules?

Om Malik, Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 9:03 AM PT Comments (28)

A source sent us a tip about this page, which has domain name of gmodules.com. The root resolves to Google.com, and that it is a domain owned by Google. It is not clear what Gmodules are: maybe some kind of new add one that takes a cue from Pageflakes and/or Netvibes? Anyone have better ideas, let us know!

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December 9th, 2007
2:43 AM PT

[...] uses the gmodules infrastructure of Google Gadgets to run the opensocial api (see the line “host” in the result [...]

December 10th, 2007
9:36 AM PT

[...] uses the gmodules infrastructure of Google Gadgets to run the opensocial api (see the line “host” in the result [...]

26 comments so far

July 11th, 2006
9:34 AM PT
Sean said:

I think it’s for Google’s personalized home page (http://google.com/ig).

There are many module you can add to your page, just like Netvibes. It is probably an official website for this URL: (link)

July 11th, 2006
9:43 AM PT
Scott T. said:

Wild-ass guess: plug-in blocks that can be used on Google Pages (or any web page?) and can talk to Google Base and other google services (similar to Google Adsense ad blocks)??

July 11th, 2006
9:53 AM PT
Erasable Ink said:

Google Modules are the “widgets” that you can add to your Google Personalized Homepage. Go to (link) , click “add content” and you’ll notice that all the official google modules are hosted at: (link)

July 11th, 2006
10:30 AM PT

They are probably the kind of modules one could use to add functionality to whatever site, by invoking methods (uhm , processes) on various Google services that provide an API for this kind of operation.

July 11th, 2006
10:53 AM PT
Brian said:

Google’s response to the iToilet?

July 11th, 2006
10:53 AM PT

I would imagine they are Google Gadgets for the sidebar.

July 11th, 2006
11:38 AM PT
Giovy said:

Mmmm… maybe some official content modules for Google Personalized Homepages, like the other listed on this (unofficial) site: (link)

July 11th, 2006
12:33 PM PT
NoName said:

See (link) scholar searchbox&start=0

July 11th, 2006
1:03 PM PT
dH said:

GModules are modules for the Personalized Google Homepages as described above, aka (link) . There is an API for that at (link)
Here you can submit your own gadget: (link)

Also I prefer to Use Google to find out -what is GModules. Or If you just want to know more. Or anything else.
;)

July 11th, 2006
1:15 PM PT
Rod Edwards said:

IIRC, the gmodules domain provides the services used by the Google Personalized Homepage modules. When I was fooling around with them at one point, I had to get API keys for the “gmodules” domain for certain things to work.

July 11th, 2006
1:24 PM PT

Or maybe Google is planning on buying Ning.

July 11th, 2006
2:52 PM PT
Om Malik said:

folks, thanks for the feedback. it is nice of you to take the time and share all the information. thank you so much.

July 11th, 2006
3:36 PM PT

Did you have time to catch an eye on Webwag ?

Webwag will soon mix a great feature: Search on MY web and on THE web, all in one click from my personalized page.

Launch by an ex early Googler, Webwag is in private beta for one week now. Go to (link) , leave your email adresss to receive the loggin/password for the invitation. If you want to be part of the first webwager testers.

And the early Googler executive, well, this is me ;-)

Franck Poisson

July 11th, 2006
5:46 PM PT
techguy said:

They did the same thing with GBuy, but then changed their mind and decided to call it Google Checkout. I wonder if they will do the same with GModules.

It makes sense. Google is the brand and by using just the G you lose the brand.

July 11th, 2006
7:33 PM PT
Richard said:

Google have registered some much weirder domains lately.
Check out these ones.

BAYAREABURRITOS.com
GUACRULES.com
MARIOLOVESPASTA.com
SANFRANBURRITOS.com
SPICYCATERINGSF.com
THESECRETOFBURRITOS.com

July 11th, 2006
8:58 PM PT

Much as I liked reading the speculation about gmodules, the fact is its a remnant of the google gadget project, which lets you add (and develop) modules for the personalized homepage as well as Google Desktop. Its clear from the note on the Google Gadgets API documentation:

Gadgets were formerly called modules, which is why the word “Module” appears throughout the API.

July 12th, 2006
6:39 AM PT

Since the beginning, Google uses gmodules.com as the domain to store widgets for the Google Personalized Homepage available at google.com/ig (the reason being, I assume, to prevent cross-site scripting abuse from widget developers). In the meantime, Google tried to rebrand “modules” to “gadgets”, but this change doesn’t reflect everywhere yet. GoogleModules.com on the other hand is a domain owned by Alex Ksikes and me :)

August 7th, 2006
4:07 AM PT
Anonymous said:

So are gadgets and modules really the same? one ends on .gg and the other on .xml … and gg seems to be binary … would be great if i could use gadgets as modules ;-)

February 8th, 2007
4:00 PM PT
Frank Wakelin said:

SO a different take on this would be that if I wanted to block the use of google gadgets on my compnay websites I can block url hostnames containing “gmodules.com”?

May 28th, 2007
1:43 PM PT
Steve said:

Its from google gadgets. I submited (link) to “add to your home page” and now the logs see requests from 12.gmodules.com, 14.gmodules.com etc etc

October 7th, 2007
11:05 AM PT
Filipe Melo said:

GModules is a deployment domain for gadgets development as can be seen here: (link)

November 17th, 2007
6:23 PM PT
Electrophill said:

It seems these GModules are being used quite a bit on YouTube lately to artificially inflate a video’s view numbers. Some videos have all 5 links counting in the thousands with 5 distinct numerals of course in front of dot gmodule.

March 12th, 2008
10:22 AM PT
Hasanat said:

G-module is a vector space satisfies some conditions over some field F and a group G. ( abstract algebra/ mathematics )

April 11th, 2008
3:42 PM PT
xo.coco.xo said:

Will it be able to work on PSP as well?

June 9th, 2008
1:34 PM PT
goog said:

I don’t know but I’ll try it on my atari

July 13th, 2008
8:40 AM PT
kvip said:

i think is that when you log into a the Internet and igoogle starts and transfer your personalized thing to your igoogle.

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