"Jabberwocky" is the name of the famous poem in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There"-verse filled with esoteric, ancient and made-up words. When the poem is read, most of us agree with Alice's assessment: "It's rather hard to understand." But in the end we know a "vorpal blade went snicker-snack" and killed the dreaded Jabberwock.

Sometimes the Internet is Jabberwocky. Threatening to overwhelm us with details (80 billion pages and rising), the ancient task remains: How do we cut to the kernel of our own interest?

By now most of us have grown accustomed to a few standard Internet portals. These portals, or gateways to the Internet, help us sift through the unfathomable haystack of Web information.

Places like Yahoo!, AltaVista, Google.com, and Netcenter are indispensable as we attempt to organize the Internet into understandable divisions and subdivisions, catalogued by subject. Most also tout various search engines that scour the Internet for a keyword or phrase. But all portals are up against difficult odds, at times overwhelming visitors more than the Web itself.

The latest attempt to give order to Internet chaos is the vortal. Where portals cater to the widest range of users, vortals (vertical portals) attract an audience interested in a single theme, or idea. These sites are organized around a particular topic (e.g., butterflies, U.S. military personnel, automobiles). Good vortals provide users with a variety of services designed to assist their vertical audience with its efforts to winnow the chaff from the wheat.

By now we are all familiar with the standard links page. One of the key resources of all vortals is the way they make their users aware of other Internet resources.

Providing users with links to other relevant sites can be simple, easy to implement, and invaluable. It can also be poorly maintained, difficult to follow, incomplete, and vague. Many of the best link pages contain descriptions of Internet sites, not just a URL--and have currency dates (usually located on the margins of most pages) no more than a day or two old.

Some link pages will also enable users to enter their own favorite links. A vortal's number-one job is to painlessly point people towards the best resources in a particular field--as a sort of link page on steroids.

One of the most important vortal tools is the discussion forum, a location where like-minded individuals can meet, discuss issues related to their area of interest, post messages and get answers.

Online, up-to-date calendars can also alert vortal users to important upcoming events. True to the Internet, these calendars are typically global in nature, organized by subtopics or areas of interest, and searchable by geographic region and in other useful ways. And in the effort to build an online community around a particular topic, many enable vortal users to post their own references to important events.

Classified ads can often be an important vortal resource. Here users can make available (or search for) items of common interest.

Not only should these ad areas let you search and post, but also-once something of value is located-find out more information on the product or service. A good ad area achieves one of the most important functions of the Internet: The direct joining of a seller with a buyer, without the meddling of anyone in the middle.

Although some users hate them, rotating banner ads are becoming another vortal mainstay. Although often zealous, vortal producers aren't expected to be altruistic. Good banner ads can alert users to potentially relevant products or services without being obtrusive or excessive in size, color or content. And at the same time, banner ads can fund providers in their efforts to create a site of excellent value and worth.

Online surveys can also provide vortal users with valuable information. Many subject-specific users are willing to let their opinions be known. Simple, unobtrusive, self-elected surveys can provide vortal users with an endless supply of anecdotes, statistics and related perspectives--provided the results of these surveys are made available to all vortal visitors.

And finally, the search engine. Since the goal of most vortals is to be an exhaustive attempt to organize all Internet resources on a particular subject into one particular site, most sites take on a life of their own.

As the Internet grows, so grows the vortal. Without a good site-search engine, much of a vortal's power remains unused. Good search engines will enable users to perform a variety of advanced search techniques--whether this lets one search only a selected portion of the vortal, or search the entire site using complex Boolean or natural-language syntaxes.

In short, a good vortal has all the ingredients of any good content site: easy-to-access, relevant information and discussions for a community of users. Likewise, any good content site should also be a good vortal. If it isn't specific enough to qualify for vortalhood, perhaps it hasn't defined its focus well enough.

If you are lucky enough to find a vortal on a topic of interest to you that goes clickety-clack through the Internet Jabberwocky, your Web experience will be a whole lot easier.

Contributing Editor Cary Griffith is the president of the Electronic Book Co., a Minneapolis new media firm.

Sidebar: The Best Vortals

Often the large portals offer the best chance at identifying Internet vortals. Some of these sites (Yahoo!, Netcenter, etc.) also contain subparts that amount to vortals. Good examples can be found at the top of the Yahoo! site, under Departments. Here you'll find excellent organizations of information around topics like apparel, flowers, music, and electronics.

Netcenter, like many other portals, organizes the Internet in the same manner as Yahoo. Netcenter's Channels section lists vortals on everything from audio to travel.

One site specifically created as a resource for locating and producing vortals is About.com. Billed as "a network of sites led by expert guides," About.com has an easy-to-use site index that leads users to innumerable vortal resources.

Were you born and raised in the U.S. military? Or are you currently in the military? If so, you might be interested in exploring About.com's U.S. military site. Here you will find a variety of articles on your topic, as well as plenty of other resources: links, community forums, and places for military personnel to shop.

Maybe you're not interested in a particular topic, but you are a member of a particular group. Don't worry, be happy-there are vortals for you, too. UrbanEarth.com is a well-designed site organized for young urbanites (Generation Y). If you want to know more about hip-hop, download some relevant music, meet and talk about the art of skateboarding, or read a horoscope written in a language you can understand, point your browser to UrbanEarth.com.

If you or anyone you know has cancer, or if you want to know more about the topic, log on to CancerFacts.com. Cancer communities, support groups, Cancer news and subsites organized around particular types of cancer can all be found on CancerFacts.com. This site does an excellent job of creating weekly cancer-related polls, and conveying the results of those polls.

Willy Loman, the down-on-his-luck character in "Death of a Salesman," might have found some solace in SalesGuy.com. Here is an excellent example of a vortal organized not around a subject, but an occupation. If you just like to sell, this site will help you locate sales jobs, acquire sales tools, create or participate in an online community discussion forum or buy everything from big cigars to big cars.

In terms of content, vortals defy concise definition. While most of those presented here are on particular topics, a better generic definition might be "areas of interest." Zydeco.com is for the consumer in all of us. Described as a shopping vortal, Zydeco.com's purpose is to give you a tailored shopping experience and put you in touch with what it calls "the best stuff in life." Organized around lifestyles and retail product categories, it offers anything from aromatherapy and candles to personal accessories.

How about a vortal organized around prominent geography? If you like the mountains, log on to MountainZone.com. Here you can arrange travel to your favorite range, book your next downhill run, get the latest info on any mountain, purchase climbing accessories or confab with other like-minded individuals.

If you've always wanted to know the best restaurant for Kimchi, or acquire a Korean label for your keyboard, you'll be able to find both at KoreaLink.com. Live chat, a singles forum, a pen-pals link and a multitude of other Korean community-related information, products and services can be easily located and researched at KoreaLink.com.