A web portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.
What makes portals different from home pages, subject gateways and directories is the fact that they have been designed with flexibility in mind. They make only the necessary assumptions as to what the users’ needs and preferences could be (customisation), leaving the rest of decisions to the users themselves (personalisation).
In the late 1990s, the Web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of Web browsers in the mid-1990s, many companies tried to build or acquire a portal, to have a piece of the Internet market. The Web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their Web browser.
One of the first search engines was Yahoo!, which started life in late 1993 as “Jerry Yang’s Guide to WWW”, which was followed by others like Altavista, Excite, Open Text, Magellan, Infoseek, and Lycos. They were also competing against the ISPs, who were offering internet access and access to a wide range of information. In the battle for popularity, most of these sites realised the more features they offered the greater possibility users would stay at their sites longer.
Today, the most popular Web Portal remains www.yahoo.com
The percieved benefits of portals include:
Some of the percieved problems of Web Portals include:
There a few examples of legal portals. In the Australian context, <www.comlaw.gov.au> is quite useful.
It provides an expansive array of search categories and topic areas linking to a multitude of Australian government legal materials.
The many advantages of legal portals are demonstrated at this site.
Further details can be found at: