Google wants to get to know you

Will Internet users get personal with Google?

The company began testing a service last week that lets users build a customized Google home page filled with news, stock quotes and other features that crowd similar pages on popular portals like Yahoo and MSN.

As part of this effort, Google is offering headline feeds from a narrow selection of information sites like BBC News and, in the future, it will allow users to add feeds from their favorite sites. The customized pages can also list local movies and weather, stock market quotes and driving directions, and can display a preview of a user's in-box from Google's Gmail service.

The service gives Google another potential entry point in the battle to deliver ads tailored to a user's stated or implied tastes or product searches — ads that marketers have been willing to pay far more for than they do for standard banners displayed to everyone who visits a site.

Google says it has no immediate plans to display advertisements based on, say, the user's location or clicking habits while using the service, but analysts say that such a move is not necessary, at least in the near future, for the company to capitalize on it.

"This is all about getting better search results, to keep people coming back to the site," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Right now, Google knows nothing about their users. But if they can get the user's permission for this, and give them better search results based on what stories they've read or e-mails they've gotten on the site in the past, that's where it pays off."

In that respect, Li said, the personalized pages are closely aligned with another recent Google initiative, My Search History, which, with the user's permission, keeps a record of previous Google queries in an effort to deliver better search results.

Web search ads from Google, Yahoo and others represented baby steps in the direction of personalized advertising, giving marketers the means to reach prospective customers when they searched for words related to the company's products. But those ads only go so far, because Internet users who type in "Ford trucks," for instance, could be history buffs, not prospective buyers.

Google's new approach could help marketers solve that problem, by following the logic of both users' reading habits and searches on the site. If users add a feed of car reviews to their home page, and swap e-mail messages with friends about buying a new truck, for instance, Google's search results could be customized to focus on that activity. Car manufacturers, meanwhile, would be far more interested in reaching those searchers, and would likely bid higher for the right to show them ads.