Internet is turning out to be the future way of life and business. Portals—the gateways to the world of the Internet or the World Wide Web (WWW)—are redefining and repositioning organisations and businesses. Whether one would like to launch a "complete" or "segment-specific" portal depends on one’s strategy to exploit the Internet opportunity. They can be subject specific too like cricket, golf, gardening, etc., provided the content is of high quality for differentiation.

The portal sites, like Yahoo!, America Online (aol.com), Amazon.com, etc., have proven themselves as true gateways—gateway to fortunes for their founders. Most of them start with meagre resources. And not only for founders but for the users too.

Focus on Masses

Yahoo!, and Hotmail in particular, got their popularity by bringing free e-mail—a revolutionary communication media—to the masses. Making the Net popular. Yahoo, one of the most powerful search engines, also offers choice of other search engines like Alta Vista, GoTo.com, HotBot, Infoseek, deja.com, etc. Features like chat, message boards, and daily horoscopes are becoming popular due to their addictive nature. Objective is to increase Net usage among the masses. The Netizens will depend more and more on Internet not only for business but also for daily needs and interests.

David Filo and Jerry Yang created Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) in 1994, both Stanford University Ph.D. students, as a hierarchical index of the WWW. Originally, Yahoo was started by its creators as a way to keep track of items of their personal interest. Beginning with a Mosaic hotlist, it was gradually expanded. After about hundred items, they could just scroll through it sequentially, and soon after, the list was already too big to search. Tools were created to allow hierarchical categorization of links much the same way as many of today’s browsers like Mosaic and Netscape. It made locating previously visited links and adding new links much easier. Subsequently, the list was made available on the Web to enable users to browse. The search capability made it easier to locate specific entries.

Yahoo was never really listed anywhere—neither with any of the "What’s New" pages nor posted to any newsgroups—and was never advertised. It grew slowly through friends, and by word of mouth. Initially, there were about a hundred accesses a day, and there was no demand from the users to add their own links. Within about six months of starting, it was realized that Yahoo was more than just a personal hotlist. Things really changed when the ability was added for people to add their own links. Popularity grew when people linked to it from their home pages. Also more functionality was added for wider appeal.

Originally, it was also not listed on any of the other search sites, however, it soon got automatically listed with many of the search engine when their spiders discovered it. It started being referred for finding specific information on the Web, including in the newsgroups. Most users found it through the Web surfing on other pages, thus, attaining its current popularity.

Things have been improving ever since; especially ease of use and efficiency of search to cope up with growing number of users, and their widening demographics. The graphics were also tweaked over time to make the pages as efficient as possible in terms of load time.

With about two million accesses a day—more than 250,000 users and about 39,000 links—Yahoo! is perhaps the largest and most complete portal in the world. An ideal benchmark.

Amazon.com—in its quest to become a complete information source on books—has assimilated a huge database. Besides, providing wealth of information, it is now one of the largest e-commerce sites. Yahoo and Amazon have been complementing each other with Yahoo presenting Amazon on its pages.

In India, Rediff-on-the-Net (rediff.com)—emerging as the Amazon of India, and Indiatimes.com took the lead. Rediff is probably the first in India to really market itself including on TV.

Like other telecom operators, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) too need to fight churn and retain subscribers. A good portal creates not only an identity for the ISP, but also helps bring in the advertising revenues. This allows an ISP to offer better package and value to its customers. America Online has such a positioning.

In India, Mantra Online (mantraonline.com) seems to be pursuing this track. In future, "personalisation" will play key role to develop customer loyalty. It will lead to customer identifying with the service provider through its portal.

To enter the Net, which portal one uses depends on its content. Whether it meets the entire user’s needs—the free e-mail, a good search engine, news, business deals, stock market, finance, and other personalisations. However, what is likely to differentiate in future will be the interactivity and dynamism that a portal or site offers. A static database will no more be enough. The users would prefer to get on-the-spot solutions by putting in information. It would be the day of "actionable content". With bandwidth to match!

By Niraj K.Gupta, Voice and Data, August,1999.