The truth is that portals are more complex than that. Anyone who offers a simple definition is glossing over the Net's amorphous, dynamic nature. It's safe to say that the Internet industry has gone portal-mad, hanging the label on just about every site on the World Wide Web. Many entrepreneurs tout their sites as portals in an attempt to ride on the coattails of the Web's most heavily trafficked sites, those all-purpose portals such as Lycos and Go. Basically, you should think of portals as electronic dashboards that help people navigate the Net much as scheduling billboards help guide travelers through airports.
Portals act as menus or tables of contents.
There are corporate portals, too, such as the internal Web sites that Yahoo said last week it and Hewlett-Packard Co. would customize and sell to big companies. Then there are geographic portals. In part, the idea is to reorganize the existing site layouts to highlight shopping and local services, not just the news. AltaVista, for example, offered free Internet access last week to people who agree to accept an advertising spot on their screens connected to their new desktop microportal. AltaVista's microportal is a rectangular window that displays news headlines, sports scores and stock quotes, even when people are not surfing the Web.