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Challenging portal giants Yahoo and MSN, Google has unveiled a personalized Google homepage with features such as stock quotes, news and email, report the New York Times and CNET. The company intends to eventually add advertisements to the page, but not for several months. Yet unnamed, the new feature was announced at the end of the so-called Google Factory Tour, a day-long event for reporters and analysts, who were briefed on Google's current efforts and future plans.

The new customized homepage feature is being launched in beta and is available at the Google Labs site. Also, users who already have a Google account - such as Gmail, mailing lists and news alerts - can immediately personalize the Google search page with drag-and-drop icons for news, weather, driving directions, movies, stocks and Gmail. Search Engine Watch provides a good summary of the available features.

The portal feature is part of a larger Google initiative to aggregate its features and information in a single place - what it internally terms Fusion. For news, Google will start by offering content from the BBC, the New York Times, Slashdot and Wired. It also plans to let users add syndicated Web content from news sites and blogs via RSS.

In addition to Fusion, the company showed off Google Earth, the former Keyhole satellite mapping service, a global database of images of higher resolution than previously available.