A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. An example of a web portal is MSN, Yahoo!, and Google.

Two broad categorizations of portals are :

Horizontal portals (e.g. Yahoo)
Vertical portals (or vortals, focused on one functional area, e.g. salesforce.com).