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Portal Reviews |
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Yahoo!| Excite
| Lycos| Netscape| AOL| Magellan| WebCrawler| MSN
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Yahoo!
is the number one Internet search site thanks in part to its depth of coverage and ease of
use. This may be the perfect place to begin a search. It is in fact one of the smallest
search engines on the Web, but its exceptional quality and additional features keep
people coming back. Yahoo! may have begun its existence as a simple search engine but it
has made the to jump to Portal status as it has added customization, email, chat rooms,
clubs, news, stock reports, weather, and a half-dozen other features aimed a making Yahoo!
appealing to both the novice and pro. www.yahoo.com
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Excite does its job
as a search engine very well, despite its relatively small size. Extra features of this portal
include email, chat rooms, news, weather, stock report, etc. If you're intent on using
Excites' search features, stick to the Power Search. You will find the results from a
Power Search much more comprehensive than a simple keyword search. Like many other portals
Excite allows a user to personalize their own Excite page with news, horoscopes, favorite
links, and other selected features. www.excite.com Top of page |
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This is actually one
of the smallest portals on the Web at only 35 million pages (WebCrawler at 2 million is
probably the smallest). Lycos does simple searches fairly well. Searches done on
phrases or a series of keywords, give it more problems. Some of the results are
redundant and many of the links are bad. As far as extra bells and whistles that
would classify Lycos as a portal, there aren't many. The extra features include
things like clubs, chat rooms and horoscopes. www.lycos.com Top of page |
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Geared more towards
providing users with a wide array of tools and resources, Netscape is heavy with portal
features, but rather thin in the subject directory area. You can search on the World
Wide Web with your choice of search engines, but if it's a more serious search you're
after go to the Netscape Search page. Here you will find that Netscape has tapped
into the Open Directory Project which is a massive subject directory populated through the
efforts of volunteer human editors. www.netscape.com Top of page |
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Not to be outdone,
AOL has developed its own portal site. Included on this site are search capabilities,
news, channels of information, and various community features like chat rooms and message
boards. www.aol.com Top of page |
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Magellan is a simple
and straight forward subject directory with very little extra fluff. Magellan's main draw
is its list of subjects, each topic has a short list of sub-topics. One particularly
unique feature is Magellan's "Recommended Web Sites" . Usually the first 5 sites
listed in a subdirectory are categorized as recommended sites implying that they are the
best or most visited in that topic. The entire site is organized well, but rather small in
size. magellan.excite.com Top of page |
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A very shallow subject directory
with a few extra portal features thrown in for good measure make WebCrawler the ideal
place for less experienced users. There's not much you have to deal with when you visit
WebCrawler. When using their search capabilities stick to single key words, the longer the
search term, the less likely you are to receive relevant results. www.webcrawler.com Top of page |
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Unlike other sites MSN's main
focus is not it's subject directory, but rather all the bells and whistles that it offers
visitors. MSN is the provider of the very popular free email service, HotMail and you can
sign up for an account through this site. Web search capabilities on this site include
ability to choose which search engine you want utilized in your search. The entire MSN
site can be personalized once you register. www.msn.com
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