Portal Overview

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 (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display.

Examples of early public web portals were:
Liferay,  AOL,  Excite,  Netvibes,  iGoogle,  MSN,  Naver,  Indiatimes,  Rediff,  Sify and Yahoo!. See for example, the “My Yahoo!”  feature of Yahoo! which may have inspired such features as the later Google “iGoogle” (soon to be discontinued.) The configurable side-panels of,  for example, the modern Opera browser and the option of  “Speed Dial” pages by most browsers continue to reflect the earlier  “portal” metaphor.