Portal. It is probably one of the oldest creatures on WWW. “Define portal,” my good friend Shri Chaubal, the search guru in Hong Kong, threw me this question yesterday when we were, as usual, having a geek talk. The conversation was, as usual, inspiring.

I gave him my simple definition on portal. A website that earns advertising money by publishing content for the aggregated readers. Well, then practically every commercial web site is a portal, even Google. But Google doesn’t publish its own content. There is fundamental difference between search engine and portal. Search engine wants you to leave as soon as you find your next WWW destination. Have you seen how fast Google can find you millions of pages result in 0.05 seconds plus that “I’m feeling lucky” button at Google’s homepage? Google wants to send you away as quick as possible.

On the contrary, although it was originally designed as a hub in the Internet heyday, portal wants you to stay as long as possible. Anyway, despite the evolution, Yahoo, MSN, and technically all the B2B sites are, by my definition, portals. They all want to keep your stay long.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… we used to measure “Stickiness” for websites. Now we measure how many visitors are basically bounce away right after landing on the site, a.k.a. Bounce rate. The web metrics changes from knowing how much the people love you to how much they hate you. But they are the same. They both affect you and you adjust to accommodate either people like you or dislike you.

I like bounce rate more because it is a reality check for the self-indulgent ego. Instead of telling you how great is your homepage, it alerts you the poor landing pages quality throughout your site. You can also keep track of your paid and organic keyword performance, etc. I have a clip included at the end of this post, it will give you a very good explanation on bounce rate.

So if portal is the oldest Internet creature, then social media is the new breed. Those end-user generated contents are so powerful to keep people around. But for that vertical search engine thing, if you want to keep me around by telling me you are a vertical search engine, I am sorry, you can’t just index your site and let me search. Because people do have a clear distinction between a table of contents of a book versus a library.

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