Okay, start.com sucks less than the Google homepage, but not by a lot.

I think you hit it on the head when you suggested, besides a lot more tools to handle look-and-feel, the site needs to be able to figure out what's important to, well, ME.

In both start and Google, what you get are endless sets of more or less indistinguishable links which means I can't just see what I want to see, I have to actually READ the darned thing, looking for nuggets of gold. But I don't WANT to read, I want to know what's important without reading.

There ought to be a way for the "portal" to learn, from watching what I click on over time, what things matter to me and, based on that, to serve those things up in a way that I can tell what's what without resorting to reading. Reading is SO last-millenium.

What I see from the New York Time or CNN or ESPN should be different from what you see. In places where we do get the same stories, they may be presented differently (that is, with different emphasis).

The way these tools work today is like giving everybody a newspaper and telling them to tear out and keep the set of pages they like best. So, I'll take sports, the comics and, yeah, I suppose, the Editorials. You choose the food section, comics and page 1. The problem is, I don't like all the comics and, really, don't care a whole lot about any sport that doesn't involve internal combustion engines or Tiger Woods.

If you like baseball and cricket, you shouldn't see the same sports section I do. What we should be seeing is a lot more subtle than making a choice of sports or no sports, and I can't see any reason an intelligent system couldn't begin to learn my interests in a reasonable timeframe.