What is the purpose of a web portal?

Answer: A portal is a web site that acts as a starting point for many other sites. Some of the largest portals include Excite, Lycos, Yahoo, Netscape, NBCi, and MSN. There are, however, many smaller portals, known as "niche portals" for specific interests. These are sites like Fool.com (for investors) and Garden.com (for gardeners).

Most large portals have thousands to millions of sites indexed for visitors to search though. They also typically have a large directory of sites, which are categorized by topic. Web portals are a great place to start when you're looking for something and have no idea where to find it.

Published: December 12, 1999 — by Per Christensson