| |
|
|
|
 | |
Who said it first? Who first decided that a huge, sprawling,
all-things-to-all-people web site should be called a portal? This was the
year a when new strategy emerged on the Web: Instead of filling one narrow
function and sending other surfers elsewhere, web sites started trying to
do it all by themselves. They became stock tickers, phone books,
communities, e-mail providers, news wires, personal organizers, auction
houses and goodness knows all what else, all in one. The search engines
started it -- Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek -- and soon the software companies
got in the act with Netscape's NetCenter and Microsoft's revamped,
relaunched MSN.
And it worked: In October, eight of the 10 most-visited web sites were
portal-style sites, and Yahoo!, the most successful of them, had amassed a
market capitalization comparable to that of major multinational
corporations. (Although not all portals were that successful -- witness the
spectacular collapse of Zap.com.) But while 1998 proved that portals can draw
traffic, there are still some huge question marks for 1999: Portals
still generate very little revenue, and they haven't demonstrated that
customers are genuinely loyal to portal brands.
Related Coverage:
Search Engine Watch
MetaCrawler
| |
|
