SAN JOSE, Calif. – Google made the boldest change yet to its famously austere home page Thursday, allowing users to turn it into a customized palette of news, weather conditions, movie showtimes, e-mail messages and more.
The new personalized home page is part of larger strategy dubbed “fusion” that aims to fuse together Google’s services with content on the Web, said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products for Google.
“Our goal here was to give users tools to customize and organize their own information,” Mayer said.
The changes to the home page are strictly optional; users need to log in with a Google account and visit the Google Labs Web page (http://labs.google.com) to activate the feature. They can switch back to the standard home page at any time by clicking on a “Classic Home” link.
Becoming Yahoo-like?
Nonetheless, many observers viewed the offering as a milestone moment for Google, which has steadfastly protected the crisp, clean look of its home page. The move is also sure to ignite debate over whether Google is gravitating toward becoming a Yahoo-like Web portal, with all of its services tightly integrated and visually grouped together.
Mayer said the service is “not about bringing all of Google’s products and functionalities together.”
But some search experts saw it differently.
“I don’t see how you can avoid the label,” said Andy Beal, a vice president for WebSourced, a search-engine marketing firm. “When you touch the lives of people and everything that they do online, and then you put it all in one place, you’re essentially a portal.”
For now, the personalization options for the home page are limited, largely because the company rushed to get the service out the door six weeks ahead of schedule for an unprecedented, daylong briefing for journalists on Google’s business practices and technology. Users can choose from among 12 “modules” to add to the page, including one that displays the first few messages from a user’s Gmail e-mail account.
Mayer said Google would expand the service in the next month or so to allow users to add nearly any content of their choosing to their home page. She said Google may even let users add modules that pull in e-mail messages from other providers, such as Yahoo.
Using RSS technology
The technology behind the personalized home page is known as RSS, which provides a way for Internet users to subscribe to a wide array of content, including news headlines.
Netscape Communications helped develop the technology in the late 1990s, and offered its users a customized home page strikingly similar to what Google is now offering.
Yahoo has allowed its users to create personalized news pages for nine years through a service called My Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo adopted RSS technology so users can subscribe to the far wider universe of content.
The similarities to My Yahoo were not lost on the hundred or so journalists and handful of analysts who had showed up.
Mayer distinguished the new Google service from other, comparable products by stressing its ease of use and the page’s “clean and crisp and Googly” look and feel.
Yahoo was not impressed by the new Google feature. The Sunnyvale company released a statement touting its “long and successful history in personalization.”
“We launched My Yahoo! nine years ago and last year redefined personalization again by providing access to millions of content sources from across the Web,” the company said. “My Yahoo! is the No. 1 personalized Web page in the world and the world’s largest RSS reader.”
It may have taken Google awhile to follow Yahoo’s lead but the move was inevitable, according to Beal.
“Regardless of the criticism that they are years late, they had to have this,” he said.
Google also gave a sneak peek of Google Earth, the 3-D satellite imagery software it has been developing since the acquisition of a local company called Keyhole last year. Google says its now has 3-D imagery of the whole Earth and has merged the technology with its search engine and mapping service.
The software will be available in the next two weeks as an upgrade for Keyhole subscribers. Google would not discuss plans to make the technology more widely available.
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AP-NY-05-20-05 1024EDT
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