Portals and Information ecology on web

Written by Prasad Addagatla.

In the article, “Evolution of Portals and Stability of Information Ecology on the web” the author stresses on the evolution of search portals and their use in “Community- Based Search” which hampers the development of the other information sources on the web.

The author discusses about some portals like WebCrawler, Lycos and Infoseek which are used in earlier days and says that Google has come up with the very good search portal which is user friendly and displays the search results in the “logical order based on the users’ click choice”. The search portals are compared to “satellite” sites in terms of the users accessing the data. Portals have advantage of the “User-Created-Content” which provides adequate information for the search criteria without any need of the external information sources. If the situation prevails the same way, then the future of the satellite sources would be bleak.

A model is described by the author to determine the information exchange between the satellite sources and the portals and which one of them is predominant among the users. “Cost Functions and Profit Functions” are explained in two cases one with fixed number of users and the other case with growing number of users.

Finally, the author concludes from the two cases discussed in the above paragraph that there is a tough competition between the portal and satellite “traffic” and both of them will disappear after some time. The increase in the satellite users may increase the maintenance cost so, they should be less satellites which in turn ceases the use of the portals as they have information accrued from the satellite source.

Work Cited:

Shim,S., Lee,B. Evolution of Portals and stability of information ecology on the web. Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce. New Brunswick, Canada. ACM Press: 584 – 588.