portal

An example of a portal site on the Web, which presents a variety of ways to make use of the Internet.

Web site designed to be used as a start-up site for browsing sessions and to provide a gateway to the rest of the Web. To increase their attractiveness, portals expanded rapidly in the late 1990s to offer a wide variety of services such as personalized start-up pages, free e-mail, directories, customized news and weather reports, online calendars, games, and free Web space. The first portals were online services such as America Online (AOL), which added gateways to the Internet. Others have come from different areas: Yahoo! started as a hierarchical guide to Web sites, Excite as a search engine, and Netscape's Netcenter as the default home page for users of Netscape's Web browser. CNet's Snap! was the first Web site designed to act as a portal. Traditional portals are under threat from a number of areas. Free ISPs are capturing customers from portals, educated Web users choose to go straight to niche sites that interest them, and satellite and cable companies offer interactive television with Internet access channelled through their own Web sites.