A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way.
Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content (e.g., a dashboard or map) and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries.
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.
Portal metaphors are widely used by public library sites for borrowers using a login as users and by university intranets for students and for faculty.
[1] A vertical portal (also known as a "vortal") is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest.
In contrast to traditional vertical portals, VIPs also provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.
[3] A web portal is a website that provides a broad array of services, such as search engines, e-mail, online shopping, and forums.
[4] American web portals included Pathfinder, Excite, Netscape's Net Center, Go, NBC, MSN, Lycos, Voila, Yahoo!, and Google Search.
This type of portal provides a point of access to invisible Web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines.
Digitised collections can include scans or digital photos of books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, maps, diaries and letters and digital files of music, sound recordings, films, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work (e.g., metadata provides information about the author, publisher, etc.).
As intranets grew in size and complexity, organization webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges.
Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and by providing different users with personalized views.
The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.
In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases.
The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data.
Emerging new classes of Internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service-oriented architecture, Web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session".
The main concept is to present the user with a single Web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers.
If the security design and administration does not ensure adequate authentication and authorization, then the portal may inadvertently present vulnerabilities to various types of attacks.