If It Quacks Like a Duck...

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 19, 2005

Google seems to be taking great pains to avoid calling its new personalized home page a portal, but I’m not sure the semantic gyrations matter. It’s a portal!

So what does it mean? John Battelle sounds optimistic, while Dave Winer yawns and implies it’s the beginning of the end for Google. Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan offers a tour if you want to make up your own mind.

Me, I’ll give it a shot, and if it helps me find and organize all my online stuff better, it’s all good (not evil). Only problem is, if nobody wants to be labeled a portal, what are we going to call these… things?

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Reader Comments

Jack Krupansky

May 19, 2005 09:22 PM

If you tell me that something is a "portal", then I have to ask lots of questions to figure out what your really mean, but if you tell me that something is a "personalized home page", then I can instantly imagine what it might be. Back in the boom, portal took on enough different meanings that it's now a "broken" term that conveys little meaning. My Yahoo calls itself "customizable web page", which is a nice clean, descriptive term. I briefly tried Google's new "thing", but it seemly no less "clunky" than My Yahoo and less "sporty" and didn't even have web feed support as My Yahoo does or a tie in with Blogger. Back to the lab for this... ugly duckling.

-- Jack Krupansky

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