PORTAL

A Web site that attracts visitors by offering free information, or free services on a daily basis. When you are on a portal site, you can use this site as a basis to explore the Web  . The most famous portals are these major search engines  : AltaVista, Excite,HotBot, Lycos, InfoSeek and Yahoo.

Usually used as a marketing term to described a Web site that is or is intended to be the first place people see when using the Web. Typically a "Portal site" has a catalog of web sites, a search engine, or both. A Portal site may also offer email and other service to entice people to use that site as their main "point of entry" (hence "portal") to the Web.

A gateway or entrance to the web.In common usage it has come to describe a starting point page with a hierarchical,topical directory,a search window,and added features like news headlines and stock quotes.For typical examples see Yahoo etc.

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.