I Hate Portals

     I hate portals.

    I don't know about you, but when I enter a new web site and see that all-too-familiar "portal layout" (search engine at the top, columns of wire news stories, "communities," "Make this site your Home/Start page!," this site's variation on the same free services every other portal is offering) I wither, I gag, I want to flee.

    It's not just the lack of originality, the blatant me-too-ism, the obvious "we gonna cash in on the Internet!" mentality, that disturbs me.... well, maybe it is. I'm not a casual surfer. When I go to a web site I want something specific from that site that I either know they have or am hoping they have. When I enter a new site and see the same jumbled mess I've seen a hundred times I'm left wondering why I am even there. Why didn't I go to one of those other 100 sites I am already familiar with? where I am probably already signed up as "a member."


The Portal: An Idea Whose Time Never Came

    The concept of the portal was a good one. "The Internet is a vast, unwieldy, unindexed place," it went. "Search engines aren't good enough. They throw a million pages at you that have nothing to do with what you want! We will categorize the web, index it, make accessing it and finding what you want so easy you will think we are reading your mind!" Sounds good... but in practice this was just the press release/positive spin of what a portal was supposed to be.

    The behind the scenes true intent of most portal builders seems to be, "Hey, let's throw everything but the kitchen sink at people so they will visit our site and stay as long as possible. That way every time they click on a page we can toss new ads at them and make money from advertisers!" The web died the day its purpose went from communicating information to enticing people to your page so you can get paid from someone who wants to put an ad on your page. (I won't mention the sites that are so convinced you won't stay for more than a page or two that they rotate ads even on a single page. Nice coding feat there, guys and gals.)

    Portals were supposed to be a starting point for your explorations of the Internet. Portals were supposed to be your "doorway" to the web. Most "portals" aren't portals at all, but attempts to be web only versions of AOL... right down to the ubiquitous Instant Messaging. They don't take you to the web at large, they take you deeper within themselves. Their categories aren't about categorizing the Internet, but attempting to build "community," that holy grail catch-all coined by and credited with the success of -- GASP -- AOL.

    (Ironically, AOL more closely fits the portal concept than most portals do. It seems like three out of five things you click on at AOL lead you out to web sites. AOL mostly abandoned the content production business years ago when they decided, "Why should we pay for it when it's available for free on the Internet? We can just link to it." AOL's pointing all over the web and they don't care because they know their dial-up customers will have to come through them every time they want to get online, period. And others, like me, who access through the Internet will still come in for their e-mail and the few proprietary things web-only services can't begin to compete with against a stand alone application, such as chat and instant messaging. ((I don't care how much virtual machines improve, HTML- and Java-chat suck.)) "Portals" don't have any such hook in you, so they create increasingly desperate ways to latch you into their site as often as possible. How about the one who claims they are exactly like every other portal -- there's something to brag about! -- except that by using them you can WIN A MILLION DOLLARS!!!!)


Sins Of The Portals

    So how, aside from the fact they aren't actually "portals" in the sense they originally defined, did portals blow it?

Index the Internet!

    I'm not sure indexing the Internet (more accurately the World Wide Web, though most people do not know the difference) is even possible. I am sure it's not desirable. Let's think books for a minute. I've seen great book indexes, good indexes, and terrible indexes. The quality depends on the person doing the indexing. (And I have to say no index is better than the frustrations of a lousy index.) The same has to go for the web. The quality is going to depend on the indexer, and I just don't see how arbitrarily defining categories, further dividing them into subcategories, then shoehorning whole sites (it should be individual pages, but who is going to take the time to do that?) into said categories is a good thing. I've certainly never seen it done well. At the times I've had to catagorize my own sites (for instance LinkExchange demands you define your site) I have never found a prebuilt category that truly fit.

    We'll totally ignore that most portals -- I'd venture all the major portals-- don't even attempt to categorize the web, but send you deeper into themselves where they attempt to fulfill your need, hence keeping you on their site, under their advertising for as long as possible, only occasionally throwing out a couple of links to "related material."

    Which takes us right back to search engines. Portals were not supposed to be about search engines, but if you want to actually get onto the web at large from the portal, you virtually have to use their search engine. (So what the $#%& are they a portal too other than themselves??) And their search engine either supplies results from one that existed before they did (and is now trying to turn itself into a portal but is none too proud to rent their database to a competitor) or is an exact duplicate of those other search engines, complete with all the supposed problems of the search engines which supposedly led us to the portal concept to begin with! (You do remember the "Search engines aren't good enough. They throw a million pages at you that have nothing to do with what you want!" bull they used to throw our way, right?)


Everything But The Kitchen Sink

    I think some of the best web sites I know, certainly most of the ones I visit with any regularity, do one thing and do it well. There is an addiction among the portals to try to be all things to all people. Again, what's behind this is the desire to keep people at your site looking at your advertising space for as long as possible. Sites keep piling more and more "services" one atop another until you are so drowned you have no idea what the site is about or where to find anything.

    DejaNews (now Deja.Com) in particular succumbed to this. DejaNews was a great service with a singular vision: create a catalog and library of every usenet newsgroup posting. They would store every posting, and you could access these messages for the rest of eternity. The whole of usenet knowledge and discussion cataloged for your perusal and enlightenment. That was great, and it worked great. Even the name was brilliant: a pun on Deja-vu, in that it was about news and you could see it again.
    Then they started adding. They added e-mail. Then they added their own version of proprietary newsgroups. ("Create your own newsgroup!" was the theme.) Then they started adding their own discussion groups. Then they shortened their named to just "Deja," after all, they weren't just about "news(groups)" any more.... Now the site is difficult to navigate, slow as molasses in winter, and buried under a ton of advertising, polls, and suggestions for discussions (on-site, of course) to read that have absolutely nothing to do with what you are looking for. The site is a mess.
    A nice little site attempted to portal-ize itself and is gagging on the effort. (UPDATE: Gagged on the effort. Since this article first appeared, Deja.com has gone out of business, selling their only real asset, the Newsgroup database, to Google.)

    Topic specific portals such as Law Portals which open into the web world of law, etc. would seem much closer to fulfilling the portal mandate than anything the big boys do ever will.


Me Too! Me Too!!

    In my opinion perhaps nothing more illustrates the bankruptcy of the portal system than their blatant "borrowing" of each and every feature on each and every other portal. If one portal shows the least bit of originality and creates something new, it is assured every other portal will be announcing their upcoming version of it within a week and have it implemented in less than 2 months. (You see this in "the real world" as well, so it is not just an Internet phenomena.)

    Come on, people! How many different flavors of instant messaging do we really need floating around the web? Must you all have "communities" on identical topics? How many e-mail accounts do you think we need? How many auction locations can we buy and sell goods at? You do all realize you are not giving us any new news don't you? Just giving us the same feeds every other portal (AOL included) is sucking off?
    They've backed themselves into a corner over this one. They have so little confidence in their own offerings (they know there is nothing unique about themselves, that they can only hope to build a certain habitual inertia into you) and are so afraid you might go over to the other site to start using its new golly-gee-whiz-bang and stay, they fear they must offer a golly-gee-whiz-bang too.


My Main Problem With The Portals

    I recently bashed Amazon.com for drifting too far from (what I saw as) its original vision. The problem with most portals is they don't have any vision. They are a crude attempt to suck in as many eyeballs for as long as possible. They are the cyber equivalent of checkstand tabloids, shouting as many headlines as they can at you hoping to catch your interest and sucker you in before you turn your head. They are dishonest in even calling themselves portals when rather than being a doorway onto the whole wide web, they are a quicksand pit dragging you into their own domain.
    Most of them exist solely as an exercise in making money. They couldn't care less about providing service to their users. To them you are nothing more than an advertisement receptacle, no matter how many times they call you "member" or claim you into their "community." There is a huge difference between having some advertising on your pages to support your pages and support your overall vision, or instead having the advertising be the vision. In the one the money supports the reason for existence; in the other the money is the reason for existence, and that is putting the cart before the horse.
    This "portal model" has corrupted good services such as Alta Vista and DejaNews and flooded us under too many poor imitators to count. (Those sites that did have a vision, were unique, did have their own content, but are now looking to portal-ize themselves should stop right now and get their focus back on basics.) Every major software distributor looks like a portal. Every information service looks like a portal. It is ugly. It is inefficient. And ultimately it does the exact opposite of what it is intended to: it drives the viewer away.


Los Angeles, CA
January 11th, 2000