What is a Portal?

Abstract

The brief history of Web portals is beginning to be common knowledge for software and engineering designers and researchers specialized on the technologies of the Web(Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1997). The first Web portals were a product of large government-sponsored “big science” projects in the United States and Europe that spawned private online services, such as AOL (Tuomi, 2002). These new businesses provided access to the Web for a fee. Then, in a second phase, companies such as Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Google appeared. As search engines they enabled users to find other pages on the Web. In contrast to AOL, they provided free access to all free pages to all users who had a technical connection to the Web. Now, in a third stage, many of these traditional search engines have begun their transformation into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience (Tatnall, in this volume; Webomadia, 2006).