A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way.

Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display.

Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers.

The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content.

Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content (e.g., a dashboard or map) and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries.

In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide.

It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

Information is any entity or form that provides the answer to a question of some kind or resolves uncertainty.

It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts.

As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer.

Data is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables.

Data and information are often used interchangeably; however, the extent to which a set of data is informative to someone depends on the extent to which it is unexpected by that person.

The amount of information content in a data stream may be characterized by its Shannon entropy.

A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web.

The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs).

The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files.

Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories.

Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.