Surfing the Web and going through several sides would probably be a thing of the past if Internet sites had their way. The alternative option would be you spending most of your time in an Internet portal to handle all your needs. Achieving an atmosphere in which users feel they belong in a virtual community is the goal of any Internet portal.
An Internet portal, designed to be both your start page and end page, is in simple terms a Web super site. Free services are the attractions of these sites. Internet portals provide free e mail accounts. Included in the other features these sites have are instant messaging programs, chat rooms, and message boards. And of course, there's the ever popular free search engine.
You will feel that you are not just merely stopping by a site when you see all these services. I fondly named this as the American express approach to Web sites. It was revealed in a survey by American express that people wanted to be called members more than customers or cardholders.
This explains how Membership has its Privileges began as a slogan. The same concept applies to portals. Why are these portal sites dependent on this community sense? The situation then reveals that everything has to do with money.
Money is earned by these primarily by selling online advertising space. They believe that the free services, coupled with the mentality of feeling like the site's member, will motivate you to spend more time at the site. And that means the site can charge its advertisers more.
Ads will be available at any part of the portal. Netscape was one of the earliest sites to embrace the portal concept. Since it teamed up other companies online rather than starting from the beginning, it has been able to offer a variety of free services. The operator of the net address e mail service, USA.net actually provides the netcenter's free e mail.
Among the many services offered by netcenter are its business related discussion groups and an online auto buying area. It's normal for Web surfers to go to Internet search engines. Thus, popular search engines have now begun to provide the same features as portal sites.
There are enough portal features in AltaVista as well, including search facilities that categorize information. A feature that the site has is a page that translates any text you write from one language to another.
The fact that Yahoo is now sporting portal features adds to its appeal as being more than just a search tool. Searching can be done, and an e mail account can be made free of charge. You can also set up a personalized yahoo called my yahoo too.
Available also is the Yahoo pager in both downloadable and java versions. Yahoo as an ISP is also possible when you sign up. Grocery shopping becomes an ease through eGrocer.
The excited product finder gives you a new way of doing your online shopping. By typing what you need, you can have a whole list of sites and prices. You are also given the chance to use the search engine.
The same thing applies to lycos. When you think about it, whatever is offered in one portal site is pretty much the same case in all the others. Since lycos offers free home pages, though, it does set itself apart from others.
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