The Internet community excels at generating a fad du jour and then, a few months later, spitting it out like a used wad of gum. In 1996 the hot item was browsers; new ones popped up constantly. Netscape, the best and brightest of them, was the darling of the Web and Wall Street-until people realized that a browser was just an access tool like a radio or TV set. The 1997 fashion was push. Companies such as PointCast and individuals such as Marimba CEO Kim Polese (whom Time anointed as one of the 25 most influential people in America) became household names. But push fell to the wayside before either of these companies had a chance to go public.

The Portal Formerly Known as Yahoo!

Now the buzzword is portals. Portals are being hyped as front doors to the Web, places you go when you first log on or when you're looking for something. In essence, it's a search engine on steroids. Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek now call themselves portals, ostensibly because they offer more than just edited catalogs of Web sites or capable search engines. For example, Yahoo! offers stock quotes, weather, mapping, an instant messaging service, and an online travel service.

But if you look closely behind a portal's front door, you'll discover the extra services are often repackaged versions of services offered by other companies that already have their own Web sites. For example, Netscape's Instant Messenger product is from AOL, and its headline news comes from Abcnews.com, the same source AOL uses.

What's more, some of these services have partnerships with more than one portal. The similarity between Netscape's and AOL's search engines is not an illusion; they're both "powered by Excite." If you're a Prodigy Internet subscriber, your content also comes from Excite. Do you want to book a travel reservation at AOL.com? No problem. You can do it through AOL's partner, Preview Travel. But if you book through Lycos or Excite instead, you'll also wind up at Preview Travel. Even travel publisher Fodor's is connected to Preview Travel.

Taken individually, none of these relationships is necessarily bad for consumers. But taken as a whole, they represent a further homogenization of the Web. The Internet was supposed to offer a diversity of options, but thanks to portals and partnerships, a small group of companies provides the bulk of our information and services.

Money Opens Portals

Worse, many of these third-party services and information providers pay for placement on a portal's home page. You're not getting steered to the best online bookstore or the savviest online travel agency. You're merely visiting the one that's paid the portal the biggest bucks. Type Travel in Yahoo!, and the first site you get is Yahoo! Travel. It is operated for Yahoo! by the SABRE Group, the same division of American Airlines that operates the Travelocity Web site (www.travelocity.com). Click Computers/Internet in Excite and you get news from ZDNet, the Web site operated by computer publishing giant Ziff-Davis. ZDNet's prominence on Excite's site is based on a business relationship rather than an objective determination that it has the best computing news.

I suspect Microsoft figured out the real reason for portals when it decided to give away Internet Explorer for free. Portals give Internet businesses an opportunity to influence what Web surfers see and do when they log on to the Internet. I don't know whether Microsoft really wanted to put Netscape out of business, as some claim, but it certainly wanted its share of eyeballs from the millions of people who would inevitably stumble across home.microsoft.com because it's the default home page for Internet Explorer. Currently that page offers stock quotes and links to other Microsoft pages, but Microsoft is reportedly working on a broader portal strategy that it will integrate into its Microsoft Network (MSN) site at www.msn.com.

Netscape still makes one of the two preeminent browsers. But now it makes money because everyone who uses Navigator is directed to Netscape's Netcenter portal (www.netcenter.com) by default. For a closer look at Netcenter, see this issue's Net Surfer column on page 111. In Netcenter, the company has created an asset that has the potential to generate more revenue than the browser itself.

Not surprisingly, the portal business is one of the current darlings of Wall Street. The stock prices of Yahoo!, Lycos, and other search engines-um, portals-have skyrocketed in the last few weeks. Netscape has seen its stock rise from a 52-week low of $14 7/8 to a high of $46 a share in early July. Yahoo!'s stock is even wackier; it nearly doubled in value between mid-June and mid-July.

I'm a Portal, You're a Portal

But is a portal really anything special? For lots of Internet users, the Computer Currents Web site is a portal simply because it's the first place they go for computer information and news. My own sites, including Larrysworld.Com and SafeKids.Com, could be called portals if I were pretentious enough to use that term. Sure, I don't get as many hits as Yahoo! or Lycos, but I do provide people with a front door to the Internet that they could use as a launchpad if they wanted to. Public library Web sites could be called portals, which might not be a bad idea. I'd sooner trust a librarian to show me the Net than a corporation with vested financial interests.

Unfortunately, one thing most portals have in common is the lack of much original material. Yahoo! is a great way to find out what's on the Web, but rather than provide original content, it links to other people's content. For that truly valuable service, Yahoo!'s founders, stockholders, and employees deserve to be rewarded. But to elevate it to the status of a megamedia company with a $9 billion market value-more than six times the value of computer publishing giant Ziff-Davis-is a bit absurd.

Portal mania is good news for portal stockholders who have the good fortune (and timing) to buy low and sell high, but like other Internet trends, it has no lasting power. Portals bring relatively little to the party other than a brand name. The actual value to the end user is pretty low. For a few more months or years, Web surfers may be shouting "Yahoo!" or the names of other "portals." But the excitement will wear out eventually. If it's information you seek, I suggest you spend the bulk of your online time at sites that provide genuine information. If a portal helps get you there, fine. Still, what matters is not the door you walk through, but the rooms where you hang out.

© 1998 Lawrence J. Magid. All rights reserved.

Computer Currents' editor-at-large, Lawrence J. Magid is also a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times. His commentaries can be heard on KCBS radio every Thursday at 3:50 p.m. and on National Public Radio. You can visit his Web site at www.larrysworld.com and send him e-mail at magid@latimes.com.

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