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Lycos  The bigger Yahoo! gets, the less you
hear about its portal competitors, but Lycos and its network of affiliated sites are hanging in there. Lycos retains
a place on our list because of the drag-and-drop functionality in its customizable My Lycos pages. It also has
a very good search engine (HotBot is part of the Lycos family).
MSN.com  MSN.com is a highly evolved portal
competitor with an interface featuring a universal in-box that handles both e-mail and chat threads;, MSN Mobile,
for sending news headlines and stock quotes to wireless gadgets, including cell phones; free home-page building;
a vastly improved search engine; and a shopping directory. Many of MSN.com’s subsites (including Expedia.com and
MSN MoneyCentral) have been members of our Top 100 club. Recent additions to MSN.com include an online calendar
and ever-increasing integration with MSN Mobile, Microsoft’s effort to bring portal-based information and e-mail
to non-PC devices.
Yahoo!  Yahoo! has long since evolved from
a mere directory to become the center of many people’s Web experiences. It includes auctions, shopping, Web store
setup, chats, and instant messaging. It was our Editors’ Choice pick for portals,
and our survey of Web site satisfaction, gave the site the only A grade awarded to a portal.
Be sure to check out Yahoo!’s newest addition, photo management and digital photo processing.
Yodlee  Yodlee is a fascinating, customizable
portal-on-steroids that takes a brave stab at accessing all the information from your favorite password-protected
sites and services, updating it on a regular basis, and presenting it to you on a few screens. You can build yourself
a sort of dashboard for your Web lifestyle, on which you can see recent e-mail messages, bank account balances,
stock portfolio totals, and more. To interact with the information, you jump out of Yodlee to the sites themselves.
Yodlee’s newest service, Yodlee2Go, brings your Yodlee-based data to Web-enabled phones.
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