Portal

Other than being a matterless vortex used to travel between different dimenstions, a portal is a web site that acts as a starting point for many other sites. Some of the largest portals include Excite, Lycos, Yahoo, Netscape, Snap, MSN, and AOL.com. There are, however, many smaller portals, known as "niche portals" for specific interests. These are sites like C|net (for computers and technology), Fool.com (for investors), and Garden.com (for gardeners). Most large portals have millions of sites indexed for visitors to search though. They also typically have a large directory of sites, which are catagorized. Though the primary purpose of pretty powerful portals is to find other sites for you, many are including more and more information within their own sites.