Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Types of Portals

One way to better understand the portal world is to divide portals into groups based on the purpose of the portal. This section describes several types of portals aimed at different functions for different audiences, and illustrates how portal sites have evolved during the short history of the web.

Web-Searching Portals

The first portals on the web were gateways to content that combined search engines with precompiled lists of related links by topic. Many of these portals were general interest and appealed to a broad audience. For instance, Yahoo is one of the most successful web portals. It combines a search engine with personalization (MyYahoo), news, financial information, shopping, and hundreds of other features to aggregate ...