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What's your default home page for your web browser? Chances are, it's your ISP's (Internet Service Provider's) bland home page with a few links and some account info. And chances are, you don't like it, but you're too lazy to change it.
Or maybe you downloaded your browser off the Web. Maybe the default home page is Microsoft Internet Start or Netscape Netcenter. You may have even customized the page a bit to your liking.
Whatever page you use, everyone on the Internet is hoping for one thing: for you to change it. Everyone, from the software companies to the search engines to the ISPs, are looking to be your web portal. (Doesn't that make you feel special?)
With all of the sites striving for one common goal, they all seem to want to take the same path. Their tactics: a bond with an influential ISP, a customizable start page, and a whole plethora of services. When one site launches a service, you can count on the other to launch it within a month or two.
The key to the web sites you will visit, according to the experts, is the first page you see in your browser. Even though you may have learned to automatically click away from your bland start page, sites have added easy-access services to their start pages: free e-mail, search engines, links, headlines, and more. They think this will make you change your start page. So now, instead of having only your ISP as your default home page, you know have a whole bunch of web portals to choose from:
From the Search Engines
In the beginning, Yahoo! was, according to its cofounders, a "hierarchal hot-list of web sites." This humble description has grown into one of the most visited sites on the Web. Why? After awhile, Yahoo! began to realize that it could not hope to keep expanding its daily pageviews just by having a good search engine. So it began to add services. It added Yahooligans, a directory for kids. It added a Yahoo! for almost every top-level category listed on its site (like Yahoo! Computers). It added Yahoo! News. Yahoo! also jumped into the directory service business with the purchase of Four11, which also included the free e-mail service RocketMail (which Yahoo! branded as Yahoo! Mail).
