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:
“However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Little scavenger away,
touch not the door,
beat not the portal down.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)