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List different types of portals with their characteristics. Give examples of each type of portals.

Marks: 10 M

Year: May 2013, May 2012

1. Introduction:

   i. A web portal is most often one specially-designed Web page at a website which brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information; often, the user can configure which ones to display.

   ii. A portal may use a search engine API to permit users to search intranet content as opposed to extranet content by restricting which domains may be searched. Apart from this common search engines feature, web portals may offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock quotes, information from databases and even entertainment content.

2. Types of Portals:

   The portals can be differentiated on the basis of their content and intended users. There are different types of portals; it is important to know what type of portal you want to build. They can be categorized into:

   i. Vertical Portal: These are web portals which focus only on one specific industry, domain or vertical. Vertical portals provide tools, information, articles, research and statistics on the specific industry or vertical. As the web has become a standard tool for business. There are innumerable possibilities for establishing special vertical portals on the market. A vertical portal covers a particular market such as construction with news and other services.

   Examples:

   Construction Plus (www.constructionplus.com)

   Chem Industry (www.chemindustry.com)

   ii. Horizontal Portal: These are web portals which focus on a wide array of interests and topics. They focus on general audience and try to present something for everybody. Horizontal portals try act as an entry point of a web surfer into the internet, providing content on the topic of interest and guiding towards the right direction to fetch more related resources and information.

   Examples:

   Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)

   MSN (www.msn.com)

   iii. Marketplace portals: Market space portals exist to support the business-to-business and business-to-customer e-commerce, software support for e-commerce transactions and ability to find and access rich information about the products on sale also, ability to participate in discussion groups with other vendors and/or buyers. They may be vertical, horizontal or geographical in type.

   Example:

   EC21 (www.ec21.com)

   eBay (www.eBay.com)

   iv. Search portals: Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. Here the main focus is on search.

   Example:

   Google (www.google.com)

   Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) . v. Media Portals: Media portals focus on entertainment, business or consumer news. Popular media portals update users on current news, affairs and information. Some media portals provide access to local and foreign TV programs such as soap operas, sports and live events.

   Examples:

   BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)

   Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)

   vi. Access Portal: Access portal can be defined as a type of portal associated with Internet Service Provider (ISP).

   Examples:

   Wanadoo (www.wanadoo.com) and now (www.orange.co.uk)

   AOL (www.aol.com)

   vii. Geographical Portals: Geographical portal can be either horizontal or vertical portal.

   Examples:

   Craiglist (www.craiglist.com)

   Countyweb (www.countyweb.com)