Google Offers Gets Personal and Opens in 7 New Cities

Google is notorious for going the "can't beat' em, join' em (and then beat' em that way)" route and Google Offers is the perfect example of that. After their failed attempt to purchase Groupon, Google rolled out Google Offers which is quickly expanding across the country. In the last month alone they've moved into Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Jose and Miami.

Google is also testing out giving users the ability to personalize the offers received. For example, a 25 year old man might not be interested in getting a Groupon deal for 60% off a Brazilian wax, but he might be interested in cheap tickets to the next college basketball game.

Google has broken down the offers they will provide into the following categories:

• Things to do
• Places to go
• Shopping
• Health & Beauty
• Services

Within each category you can check boxes to further personalize the offers you'd like to see and even link the information to your Google Profile. Google will then show you examples of the types of offers you'll get, and you can then do even further tweaking. You're also asked where you hangout, live and even work so that Google can provide offers related to those locations.

This may sound like a lot of personal information, however users of offer sites will happily jump through these hoops to get deals catered to their wants and needs.

With the inclusion of personalization, Google has already set a bar for the already established players in this market. Getting offers you don't really want every day in your inbox is essentially spam, especially if you think about how often you just delete that Groupon or LivingSocial offer in your inbox every day without even opening it. And, for an added bonus, Google is exploring the possibility of integrating the service into Gmail and Google+.

To help make this system more possible, Google has also created several new partnerships with several smaller daily deal providers like: Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, JuiceInTheCi...