The Bottom Line

While there is a little bit of customization you can do to the "classic" Google home page, if you want a true personalized portal, you can turn to Google's Personalized Homepage. You retain the standard Google search box at the top of the page, but what goes below that is entirely up to you. Between Google's in-house developers and a small army of independent programmers, there are hundreds of content modules you can add to your own Personalized Homepage. The potential exists to create a start page that contains all the content you're interested in, a true gateway to those parts of the web that most interest you, if that's your thing. If not, the traditional Google home page is still there, ready for your next searchand nothing but the search.