An article over at Sci-Tech Today is reporting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is saying that Google is not a portal.
Really? Well, if using the definition from the article, “A Web portal is a site which offers a range of personalized services on one page.” I guess that’s true. You have to click to a second page to get the full list of Google’s services.
Google may not be a portal in the traditional, cluttered home page sense, but they’ve been a search portal for quite some time now. Yahoo and MSN would be no less a portal should they clean up their home pages and Google is no less a portal because they have never cluttered theirs up.
Google maintains that it’s focused on search, but even a quick look at the new Personalization options shows that this isn’t strictly true. Weather, Stock Market, Quote of the Day, Gmail, Movies? Are these strictly search related? Naw. So why is Google so afraid of being called a portal? Probably because its the portals that nearly killed the search industry before Google became king. Google doesn’t want its investors to think its going down the same path.