Although Google's StartPage is not quite a real portal, it allows users to customize all the aspects of the page by adding feeds, gadgets and other utilities meant to enhance the access to the Google products. As you know, the search giant released Google Apps last week and it currently contains support for the Personalized Homepage, so Premier users' features are even more powerful. Today, a Google employee from the Enterprise Product Team posted a message on the official blog of the company to sustain the search giant's StartPage is really attracting people, more and more clients regarding the product as a powerful portal.

"Why do users like this so much? Because the ideal end-user portal not only has company information like dashboards, business data feeds, and enterprise search, but also combines personal information like news and stock tickers, weather, sports scores, and various RSS feeds from favorite news sources and blogs. The Google Start Page in Google Apps gives users just that, access to the thousands of Google Personalized Homepage Modules from which they can pick and choose what best serves their information needs," Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Team, mentioned.

At this time, the most used tools included on Google Personalized Homepage are represented by the gadgets, tiny utilities that usually provide one single function for a Google product. Yesterday, the search giant confirmed a partnership with IBM to offer support for the gadgets through the WebSphere portal. As you know, Google also allows its users to design their own gadgets and use them into the company's products, all of them being available on a single page hosted by the search giant. If you want to create your own Google Personalized Homepage, you should click on this link and log in with your Google account.