And it's not encouraging people to download the latest Netscape offerings. If we go to Netscape' s home page looking for Netscape products or information, we now have to bypass all the irrelevant links to find what we want. The portal page is an obstacle, not a help. There are other kinds of portals, and in some cases, they do make more sense than the Netscape example. But even here, there's a problem.
Search engines are supposedly neutral ways of finding information on the web.
To me, it seems in many cases that portal-mania has replaced common sense. Some companies just don't belong in the portal business, and expanding to portal status only defocuses what their sites really are about. Sometimes with web sites, more is less . One of the very first pages of BrowserTune asks your browser to report on itself. Note that BrowserTune isn't doing any snooping.