portal
n. A website that combines a wide array of content and services in an effort to convince users to make the site their home page.
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Examples
1998
You can't stop Web hype. A year ago, Internet gurus everywhere were touting "push technology", which sent users a modem-clogging stream of unwanted Web pages. This year a new frenzy has arrived: "portals".

Web portal sites aim to be a doorway to the rest of the Web - ideally, providing an advertisement-heavy starting page which pops up when 100 million Web users fire up their Web browsers or click on their "Home" buttons.
—David Walker, “Web hype moves to another site,” The Age (Melbourne, Australia), May 19, 1998
1998
Justice's action could slow Netscape's market share erosion, analysts say. That is important because Netscape's browser helps drive traffic to its Netcenter Web site, which it hopes to develop into a major Web portal and site for advertisers.
—Julie Schmit, “Netscape has little to gain from Microsoft woes,” USA Today, May 19, 1998
1997 (earliest)
'There are so many choices that a small number of portal sites —gateways, sites like MSN that have a spread of information - are a great starting point', she says.
—Bill Thompson, “No such thing as a free surf,” The Guardian (London), February 06, 1997
Notes
The most important of DEC's new products is the Internet portal, which is built on the reduced instruction set computing (Risc)-based DECsystem 3100 and designed to be added to a TCP/IP LAN and to facilitate communication with other TCP/IP LANs over the DECnet/OSI backbonevia the existing DECrouter 2000.
—Michael Puttre, “At Interop 89, OSI beckons; TCP/IP reigns,” MIS Week, October 09, 1989
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