THE LEADING INTERNET SEARCH provider got into the personal¬ized start page business relatively late, adding themes only in the spring of2007-the same time that the search Goliath renamed the service iGoogle from the awkward Google Personalized Homepage. The rechristened por¬tal got a Finance Gadget, a themes API for Web designers, and the ability to use Google Desk¬top gadgets just this past fall. Like Netvibes, My Yahoo!, and Pageflakes, iGoogle lets you set up small regions of content-the aforementioned gadgets (which Netvibes calls widgets, Yahoo! refers to as modules, and Page flakes terms flakes)-on your start page. Google's entry falls short of each of the others in some ways but is blessedly ad-free, and it excels in the speed with which it loads content.

When you first arrive at iGoogle, you'll see a dialog box boasting that the service lets you build your custom page in Lss than 30 seconds. This is true, but it's also about the same amount of time that the competition takes. Furthermore, as with all these services, at this point you're really just building a preliminary page-actually customizing it will take more time. To build this page with iGoogle, you simply check boxes that reflect your interests, much as you do in Page flakes, and choose one of five themes (there are many more, but the service saves those for later). Netvibes and Yahoo! start you offwith a sample page that you then customize.

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Load times depend on such variables as how many modules your page contains and the speed of the sources for RSS and other content, but iGoogle handily beat both Netvibes and Pageflakes in my testing. A My Yahoo! page with 17 modules took about 9 seconds to refresh; Net vibes and Page flakes pages with the same kind and number of modules took 17 seconds. The Windows Live personalized page took just 8, but iGoogle was fastest, at 7 seconds.

Google's attempt at a personal start page falls somewhat short of My Yahoo!'s, lacking that service's flair for letting you easily build a page that displays everything you need. The My Yahoo! Personal Assistant, Reader, and the tooltips are conveniences. Page flakes and Netvibes beat iGoogle when it comes to building public pages to share and offering other social, gadget-manip¬ulating, and page-customizing features. Google gives you an adequate way to collect a lot of Web information in one customized page, but neither the ability to load pages faster than the competi¬tion nor the lack of ads (a trait both Netvibes and Pageflakes share) is enough to bring iGoogle up to the level of its competitors