What web page have you selected to be your web browser’s “Home Page”? Did you know that you can easily change this page from the default page that opened the first time you fired up your browser? Did you know that your web browser is not “The Internet”, but only one of many tools that serve as on-ramps to the internet’s “information superhighway?

Don’t laugh. There are still computer users that think that Internet Explorer is “The Internet”. These may be the same users that once placed glasses of iced tea into “them new-fangled cup holders” on their PCs, only to discover later that the “cup holder” was actually the slide-out tray for the computer’s CD player. But, I digress.

If you don’t know what a “Home Page” is, it’s the page your browser opens to when you first start it up (or when you click the “Home” icon in you browser’s toolbar). Although most computers users may be blithely unaware, a high-stakes gambit rages over the control of their Home Pages.

Who are the players? The “big three” are Yahoo, Google, and MSN. They all want to be your point-of-entry every time you surf the web. Think of it this way. Imagine that the Maine Mall had but one door, and everyone entering the Mall had to go through it. How much would, say, Macys, pay to have that one door open only into Macys, with every shopper having to trek through Macys to get to the other stores in the Mall? A lot, I reckon.

From their humble beginnings as “search engines” sporting just an input field and a “Search” button, portal sites like Yahoo and Google have evolved into powerful software giants providing a myriad of web services. While they offer almost everything from Address Books to Weather (sorry no Google Zoo… yet), their “bread and butter” is still search. Businesses pay big bucks to have portals list their web sites above others (again, that first store in the mall analogy).

Don’t get me wrong. I love internet search. I couldn’t do this lucrative computer guru gig without it. Personally, when I search I use Google, as there is an omnipresent Google search window built right into the Address Bar on my Mac’s Safari, Camino, and Firefox web browsers. And, for what it’s worth, I have the Home Pages on all my browsers set to Yahoo.com.

Yahoo gives me a quick glimpse of what is going on in the world, one that I can personalize to fit my needs and tastes. I can see very quickly: if there’s any mail in my Yahoo mailbox (there hardly ever is); the current temperature in Bath (for some reason stuck in single digits right now – I think it’s a problem with my browser, I don’t know); news headlines (to the left of Headline News but still news); and, who Paris Hilton is going out with (then, who she’s going home with). But, I digress again.

So, in preparation for this week’s article, I did a search to see a list of Google’s overall top ten search subjects in the last 48 hours. They were, from one to ten: sex, Britney Spears, porn, ps2 game cheats, a slang word for female anatomy, Google, MySpace, Christmas, eBay, and another slang word for female anatomy.

Volumes of commentary could be written on what this list tells us about our culture. From a tech standpoint, however, the one result that caught my eye was number six: “Google”. Web surfers (by the hundreds of millions, apparently) are putting “Google” into the Google search field to get to… Google. Huh?