The buzzword on the Web these days is "portal." In common usage, the word means a door or gateway, from an impressive arch to a lowly back door. Similarly, in Netspeak, you can think of portals as the grand, imposing entryways through which you sashay on to the Web or the tiny openings through which you infiltrate it. It de pends on your self-image, I guess.

Portals are all the rage these days, but the concept is an old one. Remember The Source, CompuServe, America On line, and Prodigy? These commercial online services featured e-mail, content, forums, chat rooms, and file download areas. As the Internet became a commercial entity, these services added access to Usenet newsgroups, Telnet, and eventually, the Web itself. Some have even be come Internet service providers, competing with the likes of EarthLink and Netcom.

At the same time, Web sites--online catalogs like Yahoo, search engines like Infoseek, and just about everyone else--started bulking up. Catalog sites started adding search engines; search engines started adding catalogs; and everyone else (from Webzines to ISPs) started piling on the services, such as free e-mail, shopping, calendars, personalized start-up pages, and content like headlines and financial news.

In short, everyone's a portal. Today you can log on to your favorite Web site and be greeted by a personalized page with headlines you've chosen, links to sites of interest to you, and reminders of upcoming events.

But why turn to a Web-based portal instead of AOL? Well, if you hate AOL's training wheels or you need something more specialized or personalized, a Web portal may be the way to go. However, the major portals, from AOL to Infoseek, have cut deals with the likes of Disney and NBC. Do you really want to be spoon-fed data? If you're willing to do a bit of legwork, you can essentially build your own portal, pulling news from this site, shareware from that site, and so on.

Still, if you do want an all-in-one package, you won't have any problem finding a portal. The big portal companies want their services to be omnipresent, so if you download a browser, chances are that your start page will be the browser maker's portal. Below are some alternatives to consider.

Excite
my.excite.com

Excite was one of the first search engines to transform itself into a full-fledged portal with channels, personalization options, and news feeds. Today, My Excite is one of the best portals on the Net. It delivers loads of content from reliable sources like Reuters and ZDNet. Perhaps best of all, it's timely--you can set My Excite to update every minute.

Surf over to my.excite.com and click the Content, Layout, Look, and Profile links to customize your page. Options abound. Under the Content heading, your choices range from what news headlines you want displayed to whether you want to see a picture of the moon phase. Under Layout, you can specify what will appear at the top, middle, and bottom of your page, in either a two- or three-column configuration. Under Profile, you can add some information about yourself to get localized weather, movies, and almanac information. (You have to at least submit your ZIP code.) Finally, the Look section offers four choices: how often the page refreshes with new information, whether links open a new browser window, whether you want the page e-mailed to you, and what you want to name your page.

Within each category on your page (news, sports, etc.), you can click the Change button and do some fine-tuning. For example, after looking at my ZIP code, My Excite figured I'd want to follow the Atlanta Falcons, the University of Alabama, and professional hockey. Wrong on all counts. My husband follows the Minnesota Vikings, we both graduated from the University of Kentucky, and we hate hockey, but we do want to follow our local minor league baseball team. Fortunately, it only took two minutes to make those adjustments.

Once all the settings are to your liking, you must make My Excite your default start page. In Netscape Navigator 4.0, go to Edit*Preferences; if you're using Internet Explorer 4.0, call up View* Internet Options. Copy and paste the URL that appears when you're logged on to My Excite; this long, ugly identification number (something like my. excite. com/?uid=A73E80D583AB2E1B.save_ uid) is stored as a cookie on your PC, so as long as you log on from the same computer, the page will recognize you and present the items you selected.

As I noted in a previous column, you can search Excite's edited catalog for subjects ranging from autos to travel--the first choices in the results page are from Excite's recommended pages. A few recent additions are Java-based games (to play solo or with other Excite users), a news photo gallery of the day's best pictures from the news wires, and a community in which you can chat and share photos.

GO
www.go.com

When Disney and Infoseek got together, the idea was to combine the entertainment know-how and ABC News division of the former with the excellent search engine of the latter. The result is GO, a portal that falls somewhat short of combining the best of both worlds.

One problem is that you have to sign in each time you connect to GO, which means you have to remember your password and login name. If you've ever registered with ABC.com, ABC News.com, Disney.com, Disney's Blast Online, ESPN.com, Family.com, Infoseek, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, or WBS.net, then you may already be a member. In that case, you can use the same member name and password you use with those services. Otherwise, you have to keep track of yet another password and login name (as if you don't have enough al ready).

Once you get past that inconvenience, however, GO offers the same features as any other portal. You can personalize GO's start page by clicking the Edit button in each category (such as Money or News) in the Member Services area and then checking your preferences. It's faster to customize GO than Excite because you don't have as many choices. For example, Excite allows (or forces) you to choose the states in which to track news headlines, whereas GO's news offerings are clumped into eight big groups--Head lines, U.S. News, World News, Business, Entertainment, Health, Science, and Technology. What you lose in pinpoint accuracy, you gain in convenience.

The content is reliable and accurate, but under Disney's influence, you don't get much variety unless you actively seek it out. For example, the front page spits out news from ABC News and ESPN, and you have to drill down a few levels to get to non-Disney sources like Reuters. Compared to My Excite, GO's news is considerably softer. Similarly, the links are all corporate related--see the aforementioned list--which undercuts the degree to which GO can be personalized.

The Web Directory tab of the GO home page contains Infoseek's edited catalog of worthy Web sites. To the left is a featured site of the day and a list of new additions to GO's handpicked directory. As I write this, topics such as "Internet oracles" and "police brutality" have just been added. Over in the Community page, you'll find chat rooms and a link to build or move your Web site. If you don't have a site yet, GO offers a range of HTML editors that can help everyone from novices to old hands. You get handy templates for setting up the layout of your page. If you already have a site, you can use the WebMover program to FTP it from your old location to a new one at homepages.infoseek.com/~membername. Well, theoretically--when I tried WebMover, it shifted my site to members. wbs. net/homepages/e/p/ c/epcrowe/index. html. The sites are actually hosted by the WebChat Broadcasting System (WBS), which is owned by Infoseek, and your Infoseek URL just redirects surfers to your WBS address. It's not quite the same thing, but it isn't a big problem.

InMaze
www.inmaze.com

InMaze is one example of a metapage, or a portal of portals--the kind of place you visit not to create a personalized home on the Net but rather to find useful sites that suit your purposes. Unlike My Excite and GO, you can't customize InMaze's settings, which means the site won't give you local weather forecasts or personalized stock quotes.

The start page features two big lists: one row of 23 general interest portals (e.g., art, fitness, sports, and travel) and another row of 10 industry-specific portals (such as accounting, banking, and insurance). Click a link and InMaze spits out more lists, some of which are better than others. The list of news portals, for example, includes links to scads of major newspapers and magazines from around the world; it's well organized and startlingly comprehensive. Unfortunately, there are no descriptions of each site's content, so you can't distinguish one from the other. What's the difference between Health Center and Health Central? Even worse, several links from the main page were dead when I tried them (especially in the industry-specific group).

InMaze isn't altogether useless: If you're looking for an industry-specific portal and don't know where to begin, you could go to worse places on the Net. As a portal, though, it can't compete with the fully grown services of its big-name competitors. This is an example of a wanna-be that went live too soon.

Sites like InMaze notwithstanding, many portals seem pretty much indistinguishable from each other. But, like the search engines upon which they're based, portals vary wildly in what they do best. Some specialize in news, for example, while others give you more options for customization. Thankfully, there are a lot of choices on the Net, so you're bound to find a portal that suits your interests.

© 1999 Elizabeth Powell Crowe. All rights reserved.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Crowe specializes in online services, online research, and information brokering. She's the author of The Electronic Traveler, Information for Sale (with John Everett), and Genealogy Online, Web Edition. You can reach her via libbi_powell_crowe@bigfoot.com or care of Computer Currents.