I've been using a personalised Google home page for a little while and have found it a pretty good starting point for browsing the web. Then recently I came across Start.com, an R&D project of Microsoft's, and while initially wowed, thought I'd reserve my judgement until I could sit down and really compare the two. Tonight, I'm sitting at work, much too late, waiting for Karen to come and pick me up so thought I'd give it some time.

On first impressions the two seem very similar. In their rawest form, they're front ends to search engines with the capbility to add personalised content - in effect allowing you to roll your own portal. They each have a sidebar on the left from which content can be added. They each require you to have an account with the respective provider, Gmail for Google Personalised, and Hotmail for Start.com.

Correction: As Venkat points out in the comments below, it's not necessary to have a hotmail account to customise the start.com page. A hotmail account is required though if you wish to make your preferences portable across multiple machines.

As I'd already been using the Google page for a while, I thought the best way to run start.com through it's paces would be to try to replicate my Google setup there. My Google setup consists of:

• Bookmarks with links to frequently accessed pages such as Flickr, Sitepoint, Statcounter and Flashback among others. Just the regular daily use stuff, as opposed to Del.icio.us where I keep a tagged collection of everything of interest that I come across.


• Google News - Top Stories Feed


• Google News - Sci/Tech Feed


• Feed of recent changes for a project that I'm tracking using Basecamp


• teamaskins.net feed so that I'm reminded of when I last posted each time I browse the web


• Gmail Inbox - unread messages feed


• Google search history


• Word of the Day


• Quote of the Day


• "How To" of the Day

It's not an overly ambitious collection, and is lacking a couple of features that I haven't been able to find which is local weather for Gosford, NSW, Australia, and a *ahem* daily horoscope feed.

The first notable exclusion on start.com is the lack of a bookmark manager. There's nothing that obviously stands out as a bookmark manager in the list of content accessible from the sidebar, so unless I'm missing something I'll assume it's not available.

Bookmarks: Google: 1 / Start.com: 0

Update: I've just discovered the "favourites" Startlet, in start.com, it appears to provide a method to store (and tag!) bookmarks, but it also appears to broken. When using Firefox on a Mac I enter a URL, click the "add" button and nothing happens. I'll add a point for start.com for at least intending to add this feature, but will subtract half a point for broken browser comatibility (assuming this works in IE - I haven't tested).

It seems I can easily add a feed to Google News Tops Stories in Start.com, but to test the usability differences between the two offerings I thought I'd first remove my Google News feed from my Google Home page and then re-add it. So adding the feed back to the Google page I click the "Add Content" link, a sidebar slides out from the left listing categories of content, I click News, then Google News, then the "Add" button next to "Top Stories". Four mouse clicks. All fairly intuitive.

To repeat the same operation in start.com I just click... actually where do I click? Oh yeah, I have to click the "Start" logo in the top left. Now I have a list off categories, very similar to Google, but there's also a link here labeled "add content". I'll take a guess and go for the categories, assuming that "add content" is for adding customised content via a specified rss or atom feed. So I click Categories, then News, then... Google's not listed, but I'm sure I saw it there earlier. Maybe it's listed under "Top Feeds"? Yep, there it is. So I click Google News, and it opens in a div dynamically overlaying the content of my page, I'm assuming so that I can preview the content before I click the "add to my page" link. It's a nice thought, but I'd rather just be able to add it to my page with a single click. If it's not what I'm looking for I'll just remove it later. So at the end of all that I have Google News Top Stories on my start.com page, but all up it took me six mouse clicks, admitedly I could have done it in three if I'd thought to check the "Top Feeds" list before the "News" category, but Microsoft need to put more thought here into making the whole process a little more intuitive.

Google News - Top Stories: Google: 1 / start.com: 1
General Usability:Google: 1 / start.com: 0

I repeat this process for Google News - Sci/Tech, but I can't find it anywhere in the list of feeds for start.com. I could go to the Google News page and find the feed myself, but I really shouldn't have to. It seems Microsoft are not idealogically opposed to include Google feeds, so why not make it a comprehensive list?

Google News - Sci Tech: Google: 1 / start.com: 0.5 (achievable, but not as easily)

To add the Basecamp project management feed to my Google page I click "Add Content", "Create a Section", type (or paste) in the URL of the feed, then click the "Go" button. Three mouse clicks, and one paste functon. For start.com I click the "start" logo, click "add content", paste the URL of the feed and click "subscribe". When I click subscribe though, the feed is not added to my start.com page, it's added as a link to the sidebar that I have to click on to preview, then click "add to my page" to get on to my page. Five mouseclicks and one paste function. I think I see why Microsoft is taking this approach, there may be feeds that I want bookmarked, but not on the front page, so I can add them to the start.com sidebar. It's a neat feature, but not what I'm trying to achieve. I have a newsreader application for all the feeds I want to subscribe to, I'm looking for Google's personal page or start.com to be a portal of my more frequently consumed information.

The scenario for adding the teamaskins.net feed was the same as for the Basecamp feed.

Adding custom content: Google: 1 / start.com: 0.5 (again, achievable, but not as easily)

My Gmail feed appears impossible to add to start.com. I tried to do it by following the above steps and adding the Gmail feed url, but still had no luck. Fair enough I guess, it's one thing to consume your competitors news feeds, but to allow your users to read email using a competitors offering? Maybe not. But I should be able to add a feed of unread messages from my hotmail inbox right? No, it seems not.

Gmail/Hotmail: Google: 1 / start.com: 0

Google's shaping up to be the clear winner for my needs, but I'll continue with the rest of planned tests for the sake of completeness.

Google and start.com each seem to treat search history a little differently. It's similar to the differences when adding custom feeds. Using start.com my search history is added automatically to the list of content available in the sidebar. I can then choose to add the search results of one of those searches as a custom section to my start.com home page. It's more than I was looking for, but it's a nice feature nonetheless. Using Google, I add search history as a section to my home page and a list of my most recent search terms appears. I'm not sure whether the start.com search history results are updated when new matching content is found, I may look into that later.

Search History: Google: 1 / start.com: 2 (for going the extra mile and allowing search results to be added as a section on the home page

Both Google and start.com allow the word of the day and quote of the day to be added simply. But for start.com I had to add the "How To" of the day from ehow.com as a custom feed. Also, after adding the word of the day and quote of the day to start.com I had to click on the links provided for a popup of the actual quote and definition to appear. This prompted me to check what happens when I click on a link to one of my posts from the teamaskins.net feed, and rather than being taken to the teamaskins.net site, start.com pops up the content in an overlay. Another nice feature from start.com, and one that will keep me watching for future developments.

Fun things (quote/word/"how to" of the day): Google: 1 / start.com: 0.5 (don't make me click to see the content I desire)

Going the extra mile: Google: 1 (for making it all so easy) / start.com: 1 (for making an efffort to differentiate and offer unique features)

Start.com gets an extra point for giving me local weather and a horoscope feed from their selection of "startlets".

But unfortunately, start.com loses that extra point for seemingly not supporting the Safari browser at all which is where I do 70%+ of my browsing.

And the final tally: Google: 9 / start.com: 6 (feel free to check my maths... it's late!)

For the time being I'll be sticking with Google, if only for familiarity and ease of use, but I will keep an eye on start.com to see what develops. I know that yahoo also have a similar offering, so I'll run it through it's paces as well when I get a spare moment.

[Update]: Since writing this comparison I've switched to using netvibes.com. It's by far the simplest and most feature complete customisable home page available.

Related Entry: Microsoft start.com Developers are Listening
Related Entry: Help the start.com team to support Safari