Google moves to challenge portals

Google announced the new feature, called Fusion, at the end of what it called the Google Factory Tour, a carefully staged daylong event in which it briefed reporters and industry analysts — more than 100 in person and 500 more by Webcast — on its current services and future directions. Until now, Google has insisted that it is first and foremost a search engine, with no plans to join the portal wars. But it has steadily added services that provide functionality far beyond searching Web pages.

And as it has done so, its rivalry with others — notably Microsoft — has only grown more intense.

Last year, Google introduced Google Desktop Search, a direct challenge to Microsoft’s control of desktop computing, as it searches for information on a user’s personal computer as well as on the Web. (Yahoo and MSN now offer a similar feature.)

For its part, Microsoft this year introduced MSN Search, a bid to counter Google’s Web search capability.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said Fusion came about not for competitive reasons, but as a result of user demand. “It turns out that people really want a personalised Google,” he said in an interview. “They want Google, but they want it to be their Google.”

Like many of Google’s new services, Fusion is starting out on a trial basis, at labs.google.com. Users with a Google account can customise a page, filling it with drag-and-drop icons for news (including headlines from the websites of The New York Times and BBC News), weather, driving directions, movies, stocks, and Gmail, Google’s Web-based e-mail service.

Marissa Mayer, the company’s director of consumer Web products, introduced Fusion, which was developed under her supervision. She said Google would not sell advertising on the personalised home pages at the outset, but was considering doing so later.

Schmidt said he believed that Fusion would eventually become “the definition” of Google. “It will become a central part of Google,” he said.

“A majority of people will eventually use Google like this.” Indeed, until now, Google’s minimalist home page has been reminiscent of what the writer Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, Calif.: There’s no there there. “It’s obviously another major effort by Google to try to combat the portal lock-in that MSN and Yahoo have,” said James Lamberti, Vice-President of comScore Networks, a market research company. “The question for Google is how to give consumers more utility with Google as a home page rather than just search.” — NYT