It's Official! Google Becomes an Internet Portal!

If you had any doubts on the fact that Google works on its official homepage, this is the info that will blow your minds in case you're a classic search engine lover. (Un)fortunately, it seems like the Mountain View company prepares something that will surely challenge Yahoo, the owner of one of the largest Internet portals: iGoogle will become Google's first portal, providing access to most of the Google services. As Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped noted, the feature is available only for Google Hong Kong and Taiwan, two flavors of the search engine that provide a link to the new portal.

According to the same source, this testing version of the Google portal include "news bits from different sources, search trends, Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums to store photos, a Google translation box, a currency conversion tool, a "Sticky notes" application to write quick reminders, hover-animated links to Google tools such as the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, or Blogger and there's a ticking clock on top of the page."

One interesting comment posted on the Google Blogoscoped article by user Elliotte underlines the main idea of the Google portal: "Google 2007 = Yahoo 1998". Why? Because the Mountain View company does nothing than challenging the Sunnyvale rival and its giant portal as the services it might offer are quite similar with the ones provided by Yahoo. However, it seems like Google adds some tiny personalization options as it allows users to login into their Gmail and Google Calendar account to receive private information stored in those services.

Let me tell you how I see this new test. Google might be interested in developing two versions of iGoogle, also known as Google Personalize Homepage. One flavor would allow the users to configure all the aspects of the service and save them into their account protected by a username and a password. The other edition would be public and would be displayed every time an anonymous visitor connects to the page, showing the main Google services (Gmail, Google Calendar) bundled with news and other type of information posted on the Internet.