To help you distinguish between the different sites
which call themselves portal sites, here is an attempt
at classifying portal sites:
Search portals
Historically, these are the first portal sites (see search engine marketing and search engine optimization and paid listings). Early
on, the companies which operate them developed efficient
and popular search tools (Website directories, search
engines with integrated text, yellow pages, discussion
forum archives ...) and invested huge advertising budgets
to improve them and attract a large audience. Marketing
techniques are essential to the success of portal sites
: the amount spent on marketing generally represents between
25% and 50% of their total budget, sometimes at the expense
of the quality of the service. But marketing strategy
has conditioned the economic development of search engines.
Thus, sites like Altavista-http://www.altavista.com or
Hotbot-http://www.hotbot.com, whose technical performance
far outclasses the other search engines, were handicapped
by their financial limitations. Hotbot was bought up by
another portal site, Lycos-http://www.lycos.com, during
1998 , Webcrawler-http://www.webcrawler.com and Magellan-http://www.mclinley.com
by Excite, which built its development on a strategy of
audience winning and the maximum exploitation of the advertising
space on its sites. These research portals, competing
in a race between giants, had the means to progressively
buy up many specialist sites, to enrich the range of content
and services they could offer their visitors. Links were
established between the search engines (as soon as Yahoo
starts a search using a keyword, Altavista automatically
also starts a search), and broken (when Yahoo realised
that Altavista was moving towards the strategy of a portal
site, similar to its own). Share buying by companies outside
Internet (Softbank in Yahoo, @Home/TCI in Excite, USA
Networks in Lycos), buyouts (Altavista by Compaq) and
various collaborations (Looksmart/Altavista/MSN, AOL/Netscape/Excite)
all helped to stabilise the environment of research portals
(see the strategic map of general portals).
Service portals
Certain sites manage to generate large numbers of visitors
by offering free services and incorporating other services
to increase visitor loyalty and increase the traffic on
the server. This is the case with Geocities, Tripod and
Angelfire, which offer free Website hosting. These sites
are often closely connected to research portals, either
because they have been bought up, or because their shareholders
possess a large proportion of the capital on both sides
(Softbank has invested heavily in Yahoo and Geocities).
Personal portal
Some users want a personalised home page when they connect.
Yahoo has met this demand with the cretion of My Yahoo
- http://www.my.yahoo.fr which has an Internet entry page
which is easy to set up.
Local portal
Another approach consists of offering a local information
service on the Internet user's town or region : local
bulletin board, cultural and economic events listings,
small ads, meeting spaces. The regional daily press is
particularly well placed to introduce this type of approach,
but there is competition from faster new Internet businesses
such as Webcity Webcity-http://www.webcity.fr.
Access portal
All the access providers above a certain size have created
home pages to welcome their subscribers when they connect.
They usually began by offering a selection of sites, have
evolved towards publishing editorial content and have
finally moved towards a portal site-type strategy.
AOL-http://www.aol.com,
Club Internet-http://www.club-internet.fr,
MSN-http://www.msn.com,
Wanadoo-http://www.wanadoo.fr
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