And while TV networks appeal to the same couch potatoes year after year, portals are primarily bus stops for newbies. Develop even a faint familiarity with the Net, and you'll quickly put together a savvy collection of bookmarks. You'll turn to generic search engines only when desperate. Meanwhile, new portals keep arriving, each resembling the other, none offering anything in the way of true innovation. In trying to reach the widest audiences possible, they undermine the specificity that would make them truly effective.
Truth is, portals are brilliant ideas.
They're just poorly executed. But this is about to change. As with any search engine, for example, software from Direct Hit Technologies counts the number of times a specific term appears in a Web document. But unlike today's kludges, it also factors in the frequency that Web sites have been visited by previous Internet searchers. Chances are, someone has already found what you're searching for.