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An electronic gateway to the world
wide web. The portal is really an extension of the search engine
idea, bit instead of providing lists of sites matching someone's search
criteria it relies on a selection process to choose starter sites that new
users might be interested in visiting. The biggest portals are run by some
of the net's most visible brands, including aol, yahoo and msn.
A measure of the importance of portals is that these three companies'
sites were the most visited any where on the web in February 2003, according
to statistics from Nielsen NetRatings.
Portals are the latest stage
in the endless quest for ways of attracting web surfers and (much harder)
making them come back again. Their owners claim to achieve this
stickiness by providing a range of information services and
entertainment so essential that visitors are irresistibly drawn to return.
These might include a directory of other sites, a search facility, a weather
service, chat rooms, free e-mail and a selection of sports,
cinema and other entertainment sites. To maximise their exposure, isps
and browser manufacturers invariably preconfigure their software to
load their portal sites automatically when they run, thus more or less
guaranteeing that a known number of people will visit the site at least
once, which is important in attracting advertisers.
Quick-thinking
entrepreneurs have moved on to the next big thing in
portal concepts, the vortal. Other forms of portal are steadily
emerging, including the mortal, a site dedicated to mobile computing
resources, and even the snortal, a site updating the scratch-and-sniff card
concept for the digital age. |
