According to Bradley Mitchell in What is a Portal, Really?, a portal is a type of web site. A portal describes an Internet search engine that has expanded beyond purely searching. These features include, but are not limited to, e-mail functions, news links, stock quotes, sports links, advertisements, and product links.

This definition of a portal best describes the type of portal that Richard Wiggans hypothesized Google might be becoming in his article The Effects on September 11^th on the Leading Search Engines. This definition is also subjective because there are other ways that the word portal can be defined.