While Internet portals are good starting points for gathering information, I don’t believe they are particularly useful in their design. Most Internet portals – such as Yahoo and My Way – are a barrage of different links, photographs, etc.
This results in an information overload because rather than finding the one thing I want, I have to look through a barrage of other information to get to it until I am completely familiar and able to ignore the overload.
Google has seemed to fix this overload problem for its users: their homepage is a simple search box with a menu up top. This limits the initial information given while providing links to specific features which users may desire to utilize from the portal.
This lack of overload may be why Google has been so successful, but there may be those to whom information overload is a blessing. So how could an Internet portal capture both types of users?