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If you're new to the portal scene, baffled by the concept, or just want more information, the Portal FAQ is for you. Read on, and become a better-informed portal person.

What's a portal?

A portal is a fancy term for sites that gather most of the resources that Web surfers want in one place, and are designed to be the first destination on the Web surfer's journey, the home page, the first page your browser loads when you double-click on the Netscape or Internet Explorer icon.

What type of stuff do portals have?

Customizable news, sports, weather, stocks, yellow and white pages, driving directions, horoscopes, contact managers, shopping--you name it. Portals are adding new features all the time to stay ahead of the game. And, as soon as one portal offers something--such as Lycos' free Web page service Tripod--others follow right on their heels. Then there is Web searching.

How did portals get started?

Way back in 1994, a conspicuously named Internet start-up by the name of Yahoo! started publishing a list of the small number of Web sites at the time, and made the list searchable. The Web search engine was born!

Other search engines took the ball and ran with it. Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos stormed upon the scene to steal a bit of Yahoo's thunder, but all have benefited by the explosive popularity of the Web. All of these sites started off as merely search engines or directories, but when they began experiencing pageviews numbering in the millions each day, they realized they could use their popularity by offering more features that would keep people at their sites once the user got done searching for something. The portals would group similar subject together to entice users to check them out. The buzzword for this is now content channels.

Portal sites also began purchasing other companies and incorporating their technology into the portal, as Yahoo did when it purchased the Internet white pages company Four11, which allows the user to look up addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and the like.

How do they offer all this stuff free?

Advertising, marketing, and co-branding, that's how! The business model started off by portals trying to attract as much Web traffic as possible and then using that traffic to lure advertisers onto their sites, usually charging a set amount per 1,000 ad impressions.

The advertising model then morphed into marketing alliances whereby shopping sites paid portals to be featured in a certain area of the portal. Usually, the advertiser would be the only company featured that offered that particular type of service. For example, Yahoo would sign on Amazon.com as the exclusive retailer of books on its site. Because the Web is still in its infancy and is constantly evolving, new business models arrive with the changing times.

Now what we're seeing are co-branding strategies in which companies team up to offer services. Excite recently forked over $70 million to be provide Netscape's content channel partner--a move that definitely enriches Netscape while also providing Excite with needed exposure. It's interesting that even though Netscape and Excite are competitors, this industry unique because even competitors form alliances to the mutually benefit of both parties.

How do the browsers fit into the portal business?

Netscape, the first browser to meld text and multimedia on the Web in 1994, and Microsoft, the software behemoth, are the two main browser makers, and they take advantage of that fact. They set the default start Web site to their own portals; Netscape starts at home.netscape.com, and Microsoft takes you right to home.microsoft.com.

Despite the millions of users who visited these sites everyday when they fired up the browser, it took a while for these companies to realize the gold mine they had on their hands. Most Web surfers either don't know how or don't bother to change their default start-up site, so they head right to Netscape's Netcenter portal and Microsoft's Internet Start portal.

Now, the browser companies are using their portals' popularity to sign on advertisers and other content providers and are making a handy profit to boot. More savvy users know how to change the default start-up site and many have changed it to the portals offered by Yahoo, Excite, and the bunch. Both Netscape and Microsoft have recently revamped their portal offerings, making them much more functional and adding free e-mail and other services. Their default start-up status will seriously challenge other portals that must be manually changed by the user.