POKING AROUND IN THE PORTALS
Who has the best E-mail? The best games? Business Week Online rates the rivals
They started out as search engines. Then they added free E-mail. And instant messaging. Now you can even play chess on them. What functions will come next to the portals, nobody knows. But the one thing you can be certain of: If one portal is doing it, the others will likely follow. That's the most surprising thing about these companies, whose market valuations run into the tens of billions of dollars: None of them do anything special.
Or do they? Is there a qualitative difference in the information and services these portal sites provide? To answer this question, we set out to compare the 10 major portals: AltaVista, AOL.COM, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, MSN.com, Netcenter, Snap!, and Yahoo! While there are other search engines, these are the main contenders. They're the companies that try to collect content from other providers and deliver services free to Web users, all in hopes of raking in huge amounts of advertising revenue.
A few of these portals are odd birds. AOL.COM, for instance, is still mostly an Internet shell of the vast America Online private network. Most Internet pundits assume that the larger AOL service will eventually migrate to the Web, at which time AOL.COM will no doubt be vastly upgraded. But for now, it seems to be more of an afterthought -- hence its low score on our list (see table). Another site, AltaVista, is also missing a lot, but it's worth watching. Originally formed by Digital Equipment Corp., it was acquired this year along with its parent company by Compaq Computer Corp., which plans to spend lavishly to turn it into a legitimate contender in the portal battles. One noticeable absentee from our survey is Zap, the attempt at a portal by fish-oil company Zapata. Although it might surprise in the future, right now there's no there there, so we didn't even spend time comparing it.
Our methods for judging the portals can be boiled down to one word: subjectivity. In all fairness, how else do you rate a service company? Since all the portals are free, you can't compare them on price. We looked at the offerings of each portal and judged three factors: How easy are they to use? Do they work? And, what was our personal judgment of the quality of content and presentation?
We chose a list of content areas, such as real estate and health, and a list of features, such as free E-mail service, and assigned a score between 0 and 3 for each feature. The lowest score, 0, means that that service does not even offer the feature. A score of 3 signifies that not only does a portal have the feature but that it's doing a great job. A 1 signifies a lousy job, and a 2 means it's a passing effort. We averaged all the feature scores and all the content scores, then averaged feature and content together to come up with our final scores.
So how did they compare? Well, our initial hunch for the most part proved correct: These sites are pretty much the same. With a few glaring exceptions, they all have something to offer in each of the areas we were searching. The primary difference between the winner of our survey, Yahoo!, and the others was that Yahoo's features worked, while its competitors' features were bulky, extremely slow, or filled with bugs. For instance, it took a half hour to download the necessary programs to play card games through Excite, and when we finally had it set up, it wouldn't work through our corporate firewall. While that problem is clearly on our end, it would have been nice for the Excite folks to warn users with firewalls that it's going to be a waste of time to download the necessary programs. Meanwhile, within one minute of starting the process on Yahoo, we were playing chess (and losing rather badly, to someone named Joon38).
Our comparison also separated the pack into two clusters: Yahoo, Excite, and Netcenter as a group score much higher than the other portals. It's clear that a lot of money and expertise has been put into these three sites. While the same may be true of the others, it doesn't really show from the finished product. AltaVista finished last mainly because it is missing many of the features that have been on other portals for some time, such as chat, message boards, and instant messaging. In addition, it's clear that its content areas, such as real estate and health, have been thrown together. Much the same can be said for other low scorers in the content area, such as AOL.COM, Snap, and Lycos.
Here's a closer look at each of the areas which we surveyed:
Search
This is where it all started, and we were surprised to find how poorly the portals execute this most basic of tasks. We heard from many Web users that the quality of Yahoo's searches declined after it ditched its own proprietary engine for one from Inktomi that was supposedly more accurate. Our least favorite search engine was Lycos, because of how it presents the searches. Before it lists the Web sites it found, it gives you commercial partners where you can buy something. That wouldn't be all that bad if the pitch were in a banner, but it fills an entire page, so you have to scroll down before you can see the first Web link it found. Our favorite search engine was AltaVista's. Although it goes overboard on the number of Web pages it sends back (it located 1,529,000 pages in response to the query "Seattle Seahawks"), we found pages we wanted near the beginning of the list, plus it didn't insult our intelligence with those meaningless percentage figures that other sites like Excite claim quantify how accurate their search is.
Personalization
This is both the most ubiquitous and the most disappointing service provided by the portals. Every portal offers some form of personalization, but the results are more often than not unsatisfying. For instance, under sports, we listed the Seattle Seahawks as our favorite football team. As a result, most of the portals would send only sports news about the Seahawks, of which there isn't much. We weren't even offered an option of getting all the NFL scores and news, with priority given to Seahawks info. The best portal in this area was Netcenter, mainly because its personalized page is easiest to edit. Yahoo and Excite also had good showings here. Our favorite aspect of Excite is that you can change the background and font colors for your personalized Excite page. It's pointless, but it's a nice touch.
Chat
The only significant difference here was whether a site offers chat and message boards or doesn't. Snap, for instance, would be a much better site if it had such basic services. But after spending some time in the chat rooms of various sites, it quickly became apparent that there's no guidance or supervision in any of these chat areas. Having moderated chats could be a good move for a portal that's trying to set itself apart. Kudos to Yahoo and Lycos for guest chats that are relatively well-run and can be interesting.
E-mail
Again, it was a case of either offering it or not. Free E-mail is probably the best feature these portals have been able to offer so far, but we found little qualitative difference in the E-mail offerings of any of the sites.
Instant Messaging
We found no difference between any of the services' instant messaging services. But we would urge AltaVista to add this feature soon, since it's the only site without it.
News
While each site offered similar news sources, we liked Yahoo's news section the best because with one click, you can change the news feed (From the A.P. wire to Reuters, for instance). The other portals force you to go through an endless personalization procedure to achieve the same end.
Finance
We liked the breadth of offerings here from Yahoo, including its vast bulletin board system on individual stocks, and the ease with which everything can be found. Excite's finance section also did a great job, but that has more to do with its links to quicken.com, one of the best finance sites around. Microsoft also has great content thanks to Microsoft Investor, its own finance site, but we scored it low because you couldn't get to much of it without being badgered all along the way with subscription requests. In addition, you have to download software to track a portfolio. On the other portals you can do it all on the Web.
Health
This was a big disappointment. Most of the portals use the same content providers, such as Thrive and Oasis, but none offered anything unique. Here is one area where one portal could really stand out from the crowd if it did something unusual, such as having regular chats with doctors.
Real Estate
Although this is one area where the Internet can really make an impact, few of the portals' offerings can be termed useful. Most of the listing services are in shabby condition, and none of the mortgage sites stood out from the rest. The one site whose background content excelled was Microsoft HomeAdvisor, which can be accessed through MSN.com. It has lots of useful articles on home buying.
Games
Yahoo was by far the easiest to use and the only one that we could get to work through a firewall. The real shock here was Infoseek's lack of any type of gaming section. We assume that Disney will fix that in a flash.
Weather
We chose to look at weather information on the assumption that, even though it's a simple function, it's something everybody uses and needs. We were surprised to see a wide variance in the portals' weather offerings. We could find no weather service on AltaVista. Yahoo and Excite had the best weather information, easy to reach and with thorough five-day forecasts. The other sites offered only the temperature for the day or required going to a different Web site, a far too laborious process if you only want to find out whether or not to carry an umbrella.
Heather Green covers Internet companies for Business Week, and
Sam Jaffe writes about the markets for Business Week Online
By Heather Green and Sam Jaffe
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