Web portal: A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

Note: An almost identical definition is given at Net Lingo (http://www.netlingo.com/p2.html#portal).

What is a portal?: A portal is a site that's intended to be your all-in-one entrée to the Internet. Not merely a search site, but a site that provides you with Internet services: email, chat rooms, free personal webpages, shopping, guides, etc. Yahoo! and Excite are very good examples of portals. AOL is a kind of portal as well— a customized interface to the Internet designed to make you feel comfortable and to make it easy to find things.

Web portal: A Web portal is where you start your day on the Web, getting a little news, the scoop on what's happening online, and— if the portals have their way— it's the epicenter of your Web experience. You return there when you get lost. Your stock portfolio is there, and you can look for new and old friends to chat with online. You get your e-mail and build your personal home page there: The portal is your security blanket, your safety net, and your trusty guide to all things Web.

Portal: A new breed of Web site offers the same appealing and convenient array of features that makes AOL so popular— news services, message boards, reference tools, e-mail, shopping, and more. Except they do it all for free. Often referred to as portals, since they serve as entryways to the Internet, most of the sites aren't all that new. In their earlier incarnations, they functioned strictly as search sites— hot spots such as AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo— that brought organization to the Web's chaos. But now all the search engines are piling on new features at breakneck speed. They're jockeying to be the site you set as your browser's default home page, use as an entry point to other Web destinations, and return to day after day. That's the best way to catch Web denizens' eyeballs, and attracting hordes is what any site must do to sell a lot of advertising banners.

Portals: the new buzzword used to describe the places most people start surfing when they log on to the Web. Besides searches, these portals offer news, sports scores, horoscopes, local weather reports, free e-mail and a stack of other high-gloss features. Search sites are adding these features to generate regular customers— and make money by advertising to them, encouraging visitors to look at many pages on their site before moving off elsewhere.

Prime Real Estate on the Web— Portals: A portal is a place that people look for information. People might turn to particular portals first because they are fairly certain that they will find the information they want there. Yahoo has become a popular portal because it provides reliable and comprehensive listings of things on the Net. Netscape has built a big portal business simply by programming its browser to open at its home page by default... Persuading Internet users to pause at a portal can be quite valuable. The portals carry advertising, and revenue from that already reaches into the millions of dollars.

WHAT'S A PORTAL?: A portal is an Internet gateway, or jumping off point for exploration. Portals evolved out of search engines and directories by adding useful services like stock quotes and free email. The idea is to offer so many useful services that you'll make one of them your home page. Instead of just being a gateway to other sites, they strive to become "sticky." Leading portals like Yahoo, get upwards of 32 million visitors a month, with over 35% market share, according to Relevant Knowledge.

The buzzword is “portal”— not porthole, not portable, but portal. A portal is a Web site designed to be a place where you start your daily Web explorations and a place from which you never have to wander far. It grabs you and holds you and never lets you go. It provides so much of what you need that you spend all your time there. Why does that matter? Because a portal is usually supported by advertising, so traffic matters. A lot.