The personalization battle between Yahoo! and Google is now fully engaged. Google has released a personalized home page, a search history feature, and—as of this week—personalized search results. Yahoo!, of course, has owned the personalized home page business for years with My Yahoo!, began a search history feature with My Web, and this week upped the stakes by adding tagging and social networking to search with My Web 2.0. What is the competitive posture of these two industry leaders in the arena of personalized portal/search experience?

My conclusion is one-sided: Yahoo! has such a commanding lead in certain areas, and is innovating so much more interestingly in other areas, that its advantage is definitive. More than that, I believe Google is riskily pushing people away from its automated tracking of people's search activities. Not only is Yahoo! offering better (much better) tools, but it provides far greater control over how those tools identify and reveal the user.

At the heart of Google's personalization problems, in my opinion (though I don't see this discussed much elsewhere, so perhaps I'm way off base), is the automated tracking which can be regarded almost as a sneaky feature. Google tracks the searches of registered users so quietly that a user profile can easily be built without the user's awareness. Then, personalized search can swing into action without the user's awareness. I am no privacy alarmist, but all this is way too Big Brother, even for me. If I sign into my Gmail account (into which I am signed nearly always)—or into Google Groups—then conduct a Web search without signing out, that search is tracked and recorded. Who the heck thinks about signing out of Google before every search?

Compare this pushiness with Yahoo!'s system of weaving save/tag controls into search results. Not only does the user have absolute, minute-by-minute, per-search control over the resulting search profile, but the suite of sharing tools provides a collaborative filtering effect of much greater interest than Google's equation-driven assistance.

It is difficult to type this, but increasingly I find myself pushed away by Google's intrusive attempts at personlization. At the same time, I am actively courted by Yahoo!'s lightning-quick embrace of current trends and technologies. Google is absolutely nowhere with RSS, astoundingly—and it is getting late in the day. I don't need to belabor the awful state of Google's personalized home page, which is like a beta high-school project. Meanwhile, Yahoo! stitched fairly sophisticated RSS involvement into its "My" platform, keeping its flagship personalization product at the top of the game.

The painful truth is that Google is eating Yahoo!'s dust in all areas of personalization. Google must surprise us powerfully and quickly if it is to gain any sort of foothold in this crucial arena.