Google personalizes search with new features

By Adam Steinhauer
Bloomberg News Service

Google Inc., the world's most-used Internet search engine, began offering a new feature yesterday to let users personalize search results to focus on their interests, such as art or business.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., also put a link to Froogle, the company's online shopping service, on its own page.

Google is adding features to keep its lead over Yahoo! Inc., which began offering a new search service last month, and Microsoft Corp., which has said it will offer a new search engine for its MSN Internet site later this year.

Google is planning an initial public offering of stock that might raise as much as $4 billion, people familiar with its plans have said.

"They're becoming much more than just a search company," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst who follows Internet companies including Yahoo and Amazon.com Inc., for Janco Partners Inc. in Greenwood Village, Colo. "They are becoming more of a portal."

So-called Internet portals such as Yahoo and MSN offer search engines and links to other Internet services, such as news and shopping.

Google's personalized search feature is in the "Google Labs" part of the company's site.

Google offers new services there and fine-tunes them before putting them on its main Google.com site.