Google Joins Its Rivals in Luring Users to Stay Awhile

Google Inc. introduced a service Thursday that allows users to personalize the company’s uncluttered home page with news headlines, local movie times and other features.

The service marks Google’s first attempt to bring together many of its disparate services in one popular place: the white space below its Web-search box at www.google.com.

And it’s similar to all-in-one Internet sites, or portals, such as Yahoo Inc.’s My Yahoo, Microsoft Corp.’s My MSN and America Online Inc.’s My AOL.

Just don’t call Google’s offering a portal.

“It’s not a portal,” said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. “It’s a personalization tool.”

Whatever it is, the service makes official something that Google watchers have suspected but company executives have long denied: Once content to quickly send Web surfers to other websites, Google is now trying to hang on to them longer.

Google executives said they wouldn’t place targeted ads on the home page but might do so in the future. Regardless, analysts said, Google’s new strategy should boost its advertising revenue.

“If people are going to the site and spending more time there, they’ll be seeing more ads and clicking on them,” said Denise Garcia, a media and advertising analyst with Gartner.

Google has been criticized for its piecemeal product strategy. The company offers dozens of seemingly unrelated services, such as Gmail for e-mail and Picasa for photo sharing. But unlike its rivals, Google generally doesn’t tie them together.

Andy Beal, a vice president at Internet marketing firm WebSourced Inc., said Google’s new service was crucial and long overdue.

“To get to all the Google properties, you’ve had to go to your Internet Explorer bookmarks and click on each one,” said Beal, who also runs the website Search Engine Lowdown. “Every time you ask someone to go from one website to another, you risk losing them to a competitor. With the personalized home page, Google has got some control over where they go.”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products, says many Google users prefer the sparse home page, which has changed little since its introduction in September 1998. But Google created the personalized home-page service in response to the increasing numbers of users who requested a way to use their various Google services without having to visit each one.

“The goal is to get users the information they want,” Mayer said.

The service is available through labs.google.com. Users must sign up for a free Google account.

They can switch between the personalized page and the standard, stripped-down Google.com by clicking a link.

“This is an alternative,” Mayer said. “We’re not doing away with the classic home page.”