• by Shankar Gupta , August 4, 2005

In another sign of Microsoft's intensifying rivalry with search giant Google, MSN recently made several upgrades to the beta version of a personalized home page for its portal. With the changes, MSN's new personalized page, now dubbed "MyW3b," looks increasingly like Google's personalized home page, released in May.

The MSN site, much like Google's, includes a search bar at the top and offers modules to report the weather, news, stock quotes, or user-entered RSS feeds. The modules can be moved around via click-and-drag, and easily added or deleted.

The test version also offers a few features that Google's customizable home page lacks, including a "recent search" feature that saves user searches, and a tab that allows users to toggle between searching the Web, news pages, and RSS feeds.

The most recent wave of updates came in the middle of last month, according to the developer's blog on MSN Spaces. The newest features include stylesheets that allow users to choose the color scheme of the pages and the tabbed search results. So far, the offering is not yet compatible with Firefox, but according to the blog, that feature is in the works.

Piper Jaffrey Analyst Safa Rashtchy said he expects Microsoft's MSN to continue to roll out extra features in an attempt to compete with Google. "Microsoft clearly has increased its focus on beating Google and, over time, on becoming the No. 1 search engine," Rashtchy wrote in a weekly column Monday. "MSN search needs to add critical 'extra features' that could sway users to switch from Google."

Personalized home pages, however, are a small part of the competition, Rashtchy told OnlineMediaDaily. He said personalization features don't seem to persuade most users to use specific portals or search engines. What's more, he said, companies aren't gleaning enough demographically significant information from personalized home pages to use that data in personalized search. "It's easy to overestimate their impact," he said. "They give some basic indications to my interests: Who am I, where do I live, what kind of interests do I have," he said. "Those have some value in personalizing search, but not a whole lot."