Serach Engines Essay, Research Paper

Web Portals

When the term “internet” became a household saying, such did words like Excite, Yahoo, and Lycos. These were the so-called portals that directed Internet first-timers to their destinations and virtually walked them through the World Wide Web. They were and still are the fist place visitors go when they start to “surf” the web. Yet these portals are not just your average search engines, they have a lot more to offer like directories, chat rooms, mail, multimedia, online communities, and customized news. According to Media Metrix and Netratings Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite are the three most popular portals with each of these sites having over 200 million hits per day (Essex pg 74).

The first portal to look at is Yahoo, which has almost double the amount of visits per day the either Lycos or Excite get. Yahoo was the first major search engine and also my personal favorite. It has chat rooms for people of all ages, current news, and the depth of it’s directories are unmatched (Essex pg 74). Like the other portals it is paid for by mostly advertisement. You can track stock quotes and mutual funds in real-time.

The next portal to look at is Excite, which like Yahoo has a very good and easy to use directory. The one thing which caught my eye about Excite was when you typed in a search, it would just shootout a list of links, but would also show tables and images as well. You can also track stocks with a Charles Schwab module. Just like the other 2 portals you can make your own homepage. Overall, I think Excite is very similar to Yahoo, although it is full of a lot of commercial jargon. One thing Excite doesn’t have that the other 2 do is an address book and calendar, but it will be adding that in the coming months. Finally we come to Lycos, which is mostly business-oriented. Recently it has been rumored that the USA Networks were trying to buy up Lycos. Like the others Lycos has the basics of a top-notch portal: good search capabilities, homepages, email, and community building sites like angelfire.com. Lycos doesn’t have news-clippings like the other 2. Lycos is also geared to more personal-finance than market news. I think Lycos has a more business and less commercial look to it. These three portals are like the NBC, ABC, and CBS of television, they relaying all kinds of news to people, and yet each one has its good aspects and it’s bad. You just have to find the one that best suits your needs.