A web portal is a web site that brings information from diverse sources in a unified way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display.
Apart from the standard search engines feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.
Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, India.com and Yahoo!.
Read more about Web Portal: History, Classification, Engineering Aspects
Famous quotes containing the words web and/or portal:
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Some sepulcher, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)