Once upon a time, search engines merely searched. Since it is virtually impossible to find much on the Web without using one of these, millions of people went to them on a regular basis. A few years ago, someone got the idea of selling advertising on these sites and making lots of money. Since ad revenue increased as viewership did, it became imperative for the search engines to add more and more features to attract and keep users. Soon things like channels (large collections of links along a specific theme), chat, bulletin boards, e-mail, web page hosting, instant messengers, maps, news, weather, sports, local guides, and television listings began appearing on search sites, thus transforming them into 'portals,' or gateways to the Internet.

The major portals currently attract enormous traffic, and thus most of the advertising revenue and Wall Street action. They tend to have every standard portal feature. Usually as soon as one adds something, the others quickly follow. The financially overvalued Internet heavyweights are playing a very high stakes game, and none of them intend to lose. All of them use gaming as a means to attract customers and thusly advertisers.

Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) is normally the most visited site on the Web, mostly due to its massive collection of links. Gamers can find about 35,000 of these in the Recreation & Sports and Computer channels, as well as a great collection of history and science fiction links that would also be of interest. In addition, Yahoo sponsors chat rooms, auctions, event guides, and message boards for gamers. Members are allowed to form clubs, essentially chat rooms organized around a single theme, and gamers have started over 18,000 of these. The portal has twenty-one games that can be played online, mostly traditional card and board, and offers the Yahoo! Messenger (formally the Yahoo! Pager), an instant messenger system that resourceful players should be able to utilize. Finally, Yahoo recently acquired GeoCities (www.geocities.com) so that its customers can build their own home pages for free. The company did improve the usually abysmal GeoCities by removing the controversial watermark, but is presently fighting with its customers over a contract change which appears to grant Yahoo the unlimited use of people's web pages. In other words, read the fine print before signing up. Gamers can be found in the TimesSquare neighborhood. GeoCities also owns WebRing (www.webring.org), which can be used to find game-related web rings (601 as of this writing).

Excite (www.excite.com) is another major search engine which converted to a portal. Like Yahoo, Excite offers message boards, chat rooms, Excite Messenger, a good collection of game links, and sixteen online games. The portal features game news and reviews from Games.net, but no web page service. Excite bought WebCrawler (webcrawler.com) and Magellan (magellan.excite.com) in order to expand its search database and attract users. WebCrawler essentially offers little of its own, except for a channel, but it links to all of the Excite services. Magellan does not offer anything beyond its game channel, and has no links to Excite.

In the past year, Lycos (www.lycos.com) expanded its Web presence through a series of acquisitions. These include Tripod(www.tripod.com) and Angelfire (www.angelfire.com), two Web hosting services. Tripod has a Fun & Games channel linking to its members' sites, and game pods (i.e. communities) with chat rooms and message boards. Like Yahoo, Tripod demands the right to use its members' content. Angelfire forgoes that requirement, but only offers message boards with no chat or channel. The main Lycos site has boards, game buying and selling facilities, online play, downloadable games, a channel with thousands of links, and chat clubs. More game sites can be found through HotBot (www.hotbot.com), a good search engine acquired by Lycos through the Wired deal. HotBot's Games channel is huge, and it links to similar material on Webmonkey (www.hotwired.com/webmonkey), a site for web developers.

The Go Network (www.go.com) is a collaboration between Disney, which includes ABC and ESPN, and Infoseek. Go's game channel offers reviews, chat, tournaments, communities, downloads, and web pages, but no links. This is a site in a state of flux and more changes could be coming.

America Online (www.aol.com) is in the process of converting its ISP orientation into a stronger Web presence. The proprietary service has a channel exclusively for its members, consisting mostly of pay-to-play games, and lots of chat rooms and communities, but no links to outside content except for CNET (www.cnet.com) material. The AOL web site offers CNET game news, reviews, and downloads, message boards, and web page hosting, but the only links are to AOL sites and member web pages. AOL also owns ICQ (www.icq.com) which features game chat, play, and even a web ring of its gamers. ICQ is much like AOL's Instant Messenger, and both are available free to nonmembers. The AOL empire now includes web pioneer Netscape, a marriage roughly similar to one between Hugh Hefner and Doris Day. Originally, the Netscape site (home.netscape.com) carried company news mostly, but the debut of Microsoft's Internet Explorer spurred the page's transformation into a portal. Recently, AOL has been merging some of its content into the Netscape site, and vice versa. This portal is being revamped frequently (it recently dropped its chat rooms), but right now its game content resembles AOL's.

The Microsoft portal (www.msn.com) is easily the worst of the major sites for gamers, seemingly designed to sell Microsoft products. It uses cookies for personalization, so setting preferences is usually a waste of time if you clean out your caches regularly. The site itself is a merger of MSIE's start page and the Microsoft Network's home page, but this union did little to improve the content. Its channel (the Gaming Zone) has no links, but it does offer some material from Gamespot and Computer Gaming Online magazines. Microsoft has promised to upgrade its portal's content and things may improve in the future. For now, stick with Yahoo, Excite, or Lycos.

In summary, the portal sites offer a lot for gamers. Despite their orientation to traditional, card, and arcade style games, the links alone are invaluable to strategy gamers. They all require some type of registration, but once in anyone can start a community or put up a web page for their particular gaming vice. In addition, the instant messenger system has much potential for Internet play and game design. Think of these sites as multibillion facilities available free for all of your gaming needs. Corporate America is rarely so accommodating.