Portals:

The Future of Information Presentation

At the outset of this assignment, the prospects for reporting on portals as a useful information technology looked pretty dull. After looking at a selection of the more common portals, Infoseek, Netscape, AltaVista, and Yahoo, it was evident that they appear to be situated with the intent to be profitable by selling advertising space. This is, in fact, a major source of revenue for these sites.

Even though this is the market space in which most of the commercial portal ventures are currently operating, this is not the final resting place of portal technology. One of the defining characteristics of most of the more common portals that you would visit today, is that they try to appeal to a very broad range of viewers - consequentailly are not very good at aggregating a great deal of specific information. The other item that is worth noting, is that it is not uncommon to get highly disparate results when searching for a particular item of data, depending on which portal you are searching.

As the information age continues to flood the world with volumes upon volumes of data on many different subjects, the problem that information technologists are faced with is not whether or not the data exists, but where to find it and further, how to present it. It would seem to me that the concept of information portals is one that is easily adapted for use in this environment. I believe that the future of portal technology is much different than simply a space to sell advertising (the task that currently is the largest revenue producer for the above mentioned portals), to a virtual access node to an electronic encyclopedia of specific detailed information.

Specialization in this method of presenting information is a very realistic way of keeping track of the volumes of research data, as well as being able to organize it in a fashion that would enable efficient and effective use. An example of how this is necessary can be seen by searching for the term education on any of the popular sites listed above:

At Infoseek,

At Yahoo,

At Netscape (Transfers to Lycos),

At AltaVista

It is definitely worth noting that with the above experiment, the results obtained are entirely different, and in some cases unique. I think that this may be the result of several individual reasons:

A lack of common search criteria.
A lack of a unified presentation structure.
A dissimilar list of sites to search.
A primary focus on revenue, rather than completeness of information.

In order to solve some of these discontinuities, I think that the following events need to occur:

The creation of a standard set of XML tags for each category of specialty information
The establishment of a standard criteria for performing searches
Search engines must search ALL available sites.
A shift of revenue focus to include specialized advertising as well as user fees.

In the event that the above criteria can be satisfied, I think that information organization in the portal format will become a profitable enterprise over the next five to ten years. If this important growth and specialization does indeed occur, I think that this form of presentation will be a very valuable addition to many different fields of research, as well as many different professions. This form of information presentation can be used as a technology enabler to allow for continued growth in other fields, and I think that this is its most important characteristic.