Google's new personalised homepage, released today, will take news from a limited number of chosen sources, marking a sharp departure from its present aggregate service where content apprently culled from thousands of providers is made available.

The Google homepage, the first product to be developed through the company's internal Fusion project, is a customisable platform designed to help users explore cyberspace and tie together the search giant's growing collection of services. The product will allow surfers to customise a hub web page with news, stock prices, sports scores, weather reports and e-mail.

The search giant, which recently announced a plan to rank news providers according to their quality, will initially take RSS news feeds from the BBC, The New York Times and Slashdot. RSS, or really simple syndication, allows readers to cherry pick news sources and to have content flowed to them automatically.

More news sources are likely to be added as the product, which is available at present as a test - or "beta" - version only, is developed. News executives are likely to lobby hard to ensure their products are included on the Google site. The company provides the most popular search engine on the internet and is one of a select few A-list sites capable of driving huge volumes of readers on the web.

Despite its protests that it does not want to evolve into a web portal, the move means Google will compete more closely with Yahoo! and other sites that offer access to several services through one central page. The new service is similar to Yahoo’s "My Yahoo" and "My MSN" from Microsoft.

Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, told Reuters that the company did not want to creat a platform, "but rather to help users navigate the web better.

"Google users have told us they'd like a way to view more of the information they want in a single place," the company said.

"The personalised homepage is the first of a number of approaches we're exploring to make personalised information more accessible and useful."

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