Source : www.businessstandard.com
Richard Waters & San Francisco / London May 21, 2005
Google unveiled a new service on Thursday that lets users combine some of the company’s internet offerings into a single package, a move that takes it closer to the portal model used by rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN.
The new personalised Google homepage, which allows users to select elements they want to add to the pagesite, also represents the first alternative Google offers to its distinctive clutter-free search engine.
Under a project labelled “Fusion”, the company said the personalised homepage was part of a series of moves it was planning to bring its fast-growing range of services closer together.
Until now, Google has offered each of its web services, from its news service to Gmail, on a standalone basis, rather than as part of an integrated package of services for internet users.
The option to personalise web pages has already become a big draw for some other internet companies.
According to comScore Networks, which measures web traffic, a quarter of the visitors to Yahoo! also visit My Yahoo!, the company’s personalised service.
Explaining the decision to offer an alternative to the familiar stripped-down Google web site, Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products, said that Google now offered enough “push” services of its own, which deliver information automatically to users, to make it worth aggregrating the information in a single place.
Users of the new homepage, available in test form, can add boxes containing things like the latest news headlines from Google News, the latest messages received in their Gmail accounts and information supplied by Google’s weather service.
Google said the new service would eventually incorporate web content and services provided by other companies.
Like My Yahoo!, the company said it planned to let users select “feeds” of information from other websites to display on the homepage. It also hoped to offer internet email services by other companies, though technical issues still needed to be resolved, Mayer added.