subject: Sweet Services Offered By Internet Portals [print this page] Given their chance, some Internet sites would probably keep you from checking out several sites. Instead, you'll spend considerable time at only one site, known as an Internet portal that handles your communication, needs. Internet portals seek to provide an atmosphere of belonging within a virtual community.
An Internet portal is essentially a Web super site that wants to be your start page and your end page. An assortment of free services is what these sites offer and what also make them so appealing.
A free e mail account is one of several things that a typical portal provides for. Instant messaging, popular among users, is also offered along with chat rooms and message boards. The search engine is of course another famous feature included.
These services make you believe that you are doing more than just visiting a site. For this reason I gave the name American express approach to Web sites. Surveys done by American express revealed people preferring to be called members rather than customers or cardholders.
It was because of this that the Membership has its Privileges slogan came about. Portals operate on the same concept. Why is the sense of community so meaningful for these portal sites? Money is the bigger picture in the situation.
These sites produce free services, and so they must sell online advertising space in order to earn income. Since you will feel more like a member and will enjoy more free services, then there will be a tendency for you to invest more of your online time at that site. And that means the site can charge its advertisers more.
You will always see an advertisement whenever you go around a portal. Through its netcenter site, Netscape became a pioneer as a portal site.
Instead of having a complete do over, it worked with other Internet companies to provide many free services. Free e mail provided by the net center is actually a service of USA.
Inclusive of the offers of netcenter are a career center, an online auto buying area, and a personal finance area. Being starting points of most Web surfers, Internet search engines have become very popular. It's not surprising then that popular search engines have also gone portal.
AltaVista offers the requisite portal features free e mail search facilities, categorical information. Text translation is a feature that the site also has in one of its pages.
The portal features of Yahoo add to its highly favorable position as a popular search tool. You can search for free and also get a free e mail account. You are free to even personalize your own yahoo account called my yahoo.
The instant messaging software, Yahoo pager, is available as a download or an online java version, which means that macintosh and unix users aren't excluded. When you sign up in Yahoo, you can get it to be your Internet service provider.
Grocery shopping becomes an ease through eGrocer. Online shopping is made more exciting with the excite product finder.
Through a simple search, you will receive a list of the sites and prices. You also gain access to their search engine, one of the best in existence.
The same thing could be said for lycos. Lycos may be a worthwhile site, but it already offers the same as any portal site. Not a common service of other portal sites but one of lycos is free home pages.
