What are the characteristics and differences of major domestic portals?

"Sesame, open!"

—— Horizontal comparative evaluation of the four major domestic portals.

With the rapid development of the Internet industry, the Internet has entered the lives of ordinary people. The portal website, which is considered as the online information center, has become the fastest source of information for more and more netizens. At present, there are several large portals in China, such as Sina, Netease, Sohu and China. Everyone has their own user groups and enjoys a considerable number of users.

These portals, which grew up in the hottest days of the Internet industry in China, have developed to what extent and provided what services after the cold winter of the Internet? What is the difference between its advantages and disadvantages?

At night, thousands of lights are on.

When a person sits at his desk, turns on his computer and connects to the Internet, what website does he visit first? It could be a portal.

Sina? Sohu? Netease? Everyone has his own choice. However, when you browse the web and look for information you are interested in, you will never think about what the portal is and what it brings us. People are enjoying the great shock pleasure brought by the information revolution. People discovered the New World and soon made it their home.

What is a portal? Portal is a concept. It is an entity company; It consists of a huge website group; It has a considerable scale; It is an information center; Its audience is the most extensive; It provides a perfect search function; It provides various network services. ...

It is difficult to give it a complete definition.

If one day, someone asks you which portal you like best, what you get from it every day, what is the portal in your mind, and should you charge? How will you answer these questions? You will suddenly find that you are still so strange to it. When you get the information you want from the portal, promote the communication you desire, and even promote the completion of your work, will you ask who provided you with all this?

In Chinese mainland, netizens have accounted for more than 20% of the population in developed cities in just three years. This is a powerful consumption force. What groups are they made up of? This is the problem that the discoverers of the New World considered. What they see is not only the countryside, forests and land in front of them, but also a utopian future empire. The decision makers of domestic portals are continuing the successful experience of foreign portals, but they are still struggling. The popularity of free services makes portal websites create a business model unprecedented. At the beginning of the dream, the internet bubble was punctured by the spear of profit. The cold winter of the Internet is coming. But the information of spring is often hidden in the frozen soil in winter. Survivors in winter need tenacious perseverance and strong body. In this cold winter, how is the portal supported?

Introduction of 4 portals participating in the evaluation

Name: Sina

Website: www.sina.com

Sina. Com was founded at the end of 1998, and its predecessor was Stone Li Fang Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Huayuan Information Company. The two companies announced their merger on 1998 12 1 to form Sina. And launched a Chinese website with the same name. At present, Sina.com has four Chinese sub-stations and one English sub-station in North America, Peking, Taibei and Hongkong.

At present, Beijing Sina is one of the most famous portals in China, which is divided into news center, search engine, finance and economics, online communication, living space, competitive storm, game world, science and technology era and so on. According to the Survey of Internet Users' Behaviors and Attitudes in China jointly released by Beijing CCID Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Gallup Consulting Co., Ltd., Sina, Sohu and Netease occupy the first place in the comprehensive ranking. Among them, Sina has the highest popularity, reaching 25%, followed by Sohu (17%) and Netease (1 1%).

Name: Netease

Website: www.163.com.

Netease was founded in June, 1997. Its predecessor was a personal community forum made by Ding Lei, the founder of Netease. Netease is a portal website popular with netizens, and its forums and chat rooms have always maintained a high number of visits. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has twice selected it as the top ten websites in China. With more than 30 million registered users, Netease has achieved a number of leading positions in the domestic Internet industry in developing Internet applications and service technologies.

The original Netease Forum has more than ten sections, including computer technology, programming world, software download, emotional world, leisure fashion, dance academy, music, film and television, ancient and modern politics and history, local conditions and customs, etc. It was the most popular community forum in China at that time, which was divided into two local communities, Guangzhou and Beijing.

At present, Netease * * * has 18 unique online content channels, providing users with domestic and international current affairs, financial reports, life information, fashion, film and television trends, environmental protection topics, sports events and other information. In addition, there are 42 free e-magazines, personal homepage space and personal domain name service.

Name: Sohu

Website: www.sohu.com

Fox Company was established in August 1996, and received venture capital support from Mr. Negroponte, director of the Media Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. Edward Robert, an American venture capital expert. Later, it was invested by companies including Intel Corporation, Dow Jones Corporation, Morningstar Corporation, IDG Corporation, Pacific Century Development Corporation and Lenovo. On September 14, 2000, Sohu acquired another large website, ChinaRen. At present, its registered users have reached more than 33 million, and the daily browsing page volume has reached more than 65.438+300 million. It has been highly praised by third-party Internet authoritative evaluation agencies such as iamasia, Alexa and Netvalue.

Sohu was originally a large-scale classified search engine in China. After several years of development, it has become a comprehensive portal that users love. Based on the development of search engine, Sohu launched news, sports, business finance, SMS, car, real estate, home, entertainment, life, health, education, job hunting, IT, women, games and other content channels, and also launched shopping, free mail, chat rooms, message boards and Sohu Mall, which provided information sources and places for online communication for netizens.

Name: China Net.

Website: www.china.com

China Com is a portal website owned by China. Com, a joint venture between Hong Kong businessman Ye Keyong and Xinhua News Agency, AOL, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., edelson Technology Partners and New World Infrastructure Company. The predecessor of China. Com is another portal of this company, China Net (CWW.com). Besides China.com, China Network Group also owns several other websites, such as Hongkong.com and CWW.com, AEON International and 24/7 Interactive Media Asia Limited.

China Com was founded in April 1999, and its predecessor was founded in August 1995. China Com is mainly aimed at Chinese people all over the world and provides pages in three languages, including simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English. Information provided by China at present. Com includes science and technology, culture, sports, health and entertainment. It also provides e-commerce, e-mail, interactive chat rooms and online community services. Connection speed and interface experience

From the point of view of access speed, China Net and Netease often can't connect, and the access speed is too slow, so some pages can't be accessed. As for the related links under the specific article content, incomplete or untimely update is a common problem of all portals. However, this has a lot to do with the poor access conditions of domestic networks.

As far as the interface is concerned, the contents of the four portals are arranged evenly, and only Sina shows its own characteristics-news is the highlight, and the first half of the whole homepage focuses on several successful parts of Sina: news highlights, shopping in the mall, and mobile phone information channels. But its news section is too scattered, and all kinds of news are mixed together, which is not as good as Netease and Sohu. Netease's news column is in the lower part of the whole home page, and each category has only 1 main information, which is slightly monotonous, but the categories are more comprehensive; But the headlines and news headlines of some life articles are mixed with each other, which is not so pleasing to the eye. Sohu's news section has been drawn as a slender bar on the left side of the home page, but the classification is clear and well organized, but unfortunately it is not well classified. China News Edition. Com is in the center of the homepage, but the topic news and channel sections are separated, and the classification work is not as good as Sina.

The news of the four websites is very timely, but the news contents of Sina and Netease are misspelled and garbled from time to time, and the relevant data are not accurate. Especially in sports, science and technology, financial news, many foreign names and place names are translated incorrectly, digital data are wrong, and commodity or manufacturer names are confused.

In the sub-column page, the links are evenly arranged on the left and right sides of the main content, framed by several different bright color blocks, and the soft and warm colors are used, which makes it feel more affinity. The overall design of several websites is similar, lacking their own characteristics. There are huge advertisements in Sina's layout, and the visual effect is quite abrupt. A considerable number of links are merchandise promotions, accounting for slightly more than the other three websites. The content pages of several websites are dominated by gray backgrounds combined with other colors. Sina often inserts large advertisements in its content, and the colors are too fancy, which easily leads to visual fatigue.

Update quantity

The four websites participating in the evaluation have made great efforts on the news channel. Each website has more than ten news columns such as international, domestic, social, sports, finance, entertainment, science and technology, culture and education, and all have comprehensive columns such as rolling news, hot comments and news topic. Sina ranks among the top four websites in terms of the number of updates, followed by Sohu. The news channels of China.com and Netease are quite different from the above two websites. Here we also found an interesting phenomenon, that is, Netease news seems to have an "upper limit"-40 articles, and the news of each column fluctuates up and down this number every day.

Sina's daily update volume is basically the largest, especially financial news, which is maintained at the level of 400 ~ 600 articles per day, and sports news and domestic and foreign news are also maintained at a high level; Sohu. Domestic and foreign news of com and Sina. Com remains at a similar level, which is the biggest column of Sohu News. China Com and Netease are obviously backward in number, which also reflects the different emphasis of website construction. In the process of using the news databases of various websites to count the news updates of the previous day, we found that the contents of the news columns were repeated. There is a certain relationship between the error rate and the amount of news. Due to the huge amount of news, there are a little more repeated news or wrongly linked information in Sina.com, but the overall quality is satisfactory. Sohu. Com has done a good job and achieved good results in quality and quantity. China Com and Netease adhere to the principle of less but better, and report less mistakes in the focus news. Generally speaking, the news content of the four websites is exactly the same, which is puzzling. These errors affect the final statistical results to some extent. We recorded some obvious mistakes in the statistical process, mainly in the repetition of two adjacent news items in the same column, such as: 200 1 10 26, Sina science and technology column entitled "India, Singapore big group users favor WinXP", and the news content was repeated; There is something wrong with the format or content of news headlines, such as: Netease Sports Column165438+1the news named "Test" on October 5th, and there is no text or picture report after clicking it. The test results are shown in the figure below.

Content evaluation

In this kind of evaluation, content evaluation is an important project. In this regard, we selected 10 representative channels for comprehensive investigation, and the final result was satisfactory. Although they all have shortcomings, we can see that all websites have spent more energy on these aspects. news channel

News channel is the most important of all columns in a comprehensive website, because the network is accepted by people and develops vigorously because it is an information superhighway, and news is the best representation of its fast information. Therefore, the news channels of these four websites are relatively mature, with reasonable column distribution and prominent key news.

Due to the timeliness of news reports, the news of various websites is updated quickly. For those news that attract public attention, we should combine news reports with analysis reports to meet the needs of different audiences. Due to the limitation of network speed, at this stage, the website has not been able to take video reporting as the main reporting form of major events, but all adopt the live webcast mode with text as the main and pictures as the supplement. In this link, Sina. The performance of com is the most outstanding, and the reporter saw its live text and instant photo reports on major events in politics, finance, sports and so on.

In order to analyze and report major events in more detail, all websites adopt the form of special topics, but these four websites are different from traditional media. All they do is simply edit different reports of the same event on one page, which leads to a phenomenon that when we click on a topic, we will see many articles. Strictly speaking, this form cannot be called a topic. And in these articles, the reporter also found many articles with similar contents. Take Sina as an example, there are many reports with different topics but the same content, and the other three websites have similar phenomena.

In detail, each website has its own characteristics. Sina's public comments, Netease's homepage rolling news, Sohu's video news and China Dialogue all provide better news services for the majority of netizens. However, because the news involved in these four websites is too comprehensive, some tidbits appear too much, which reduces the credibility of the website news.

Educational channel

Educational channels should be much more serious than the content of any channel. All four websites have noticed the practicality of education, and there are many overlapping parts in the content. All four websites have special topics about training, studying abroad and exams. In terms of news reporting, the four schools strive to be extensive and timely, but their respective characteristics are not very prominent in depth and distinct views.

Sina's education channel also tends to be an examination center, but it is not willing to be big and comprehensive. The setting of the two sub-columns of homecoming and culture is a bit neither fish nor fowl. The contents of these two sub-columns are very miscellaneous, and the Alumni Association is similar to the topic of campus life in China. However, the advantages of including the original Chinaren are not important. Early education is its uniqueness. In terms of educational information and special topics, Sina's performance is mediocre.

Netease education channel is relatively simple, only news and educational news, and distance teaching is its characteristic. Its Netease school is brilliant.

Sohu Education Channel pays more attention to the practical function of education and provides all kinds of exam training information, which can be said to be an exam channel. It can't completely cover all aspects of education, but it has its own characteristics. Sohu seems to want to have an exclusive advantage in features.

China Com has set up special channels in education, including educational news, topics of campus life, family education and various academic examinations, as well as an online question bank with a lot of practical information. In addition, China Education News. Com seems to care too much about sex education.

sports channel

Sports is a hot topic in China, and the four portals will naturally not ignore this huge audience, so there are many reports on various sports, especially the advantageous events in China and the popular events in the world. However, if you compare carefully, you can still see the difference in reporting intensity. In order to correctly reflect this difference, we chose to report the last two matches of Asian Group A in the 2002 World Cup qualifier on June 22nd 10. Although this group has always been concerned, because there is no China team, it is not so important in the eyes of Chinese people, so the weight of this report is heavier than the general report, but it is not the hottest topic. But this may expose more problems.

The specific analysis is as follows:

Iran lost to Bahrain away 1-3. Just two hours after Saudi Arabia beat Thailand to qualify directly, Sohu's reporter had already made a news response, and then detailed the whole process of Bahrain's defeat of Iran. Sina reported 18 minutes later than Sohu, but their descriptions of the key matches between Iran and Bahrain and related reports afterwards were slightly better than Sohu. Netease's brief report was three hours late, and their reporting time was1October 22 17:02:27. As for China. Com, there is an obvious gap in the time and depth of reporting. The only feature is the title they used-"Top Ten Competition Group A: The West Asian Union is unstoppable. Iran 1:3 lost to Bahrain. " After reading it for a long time, I don't quite understand it. It is estimated that the top teams in this group are all from West Asia, but what is the significance of such a report?

Financial channel

Speaking of finance and economics, the first impression must include the stock market, so let's pay attention to the stock market section of the evaluation website first. In fact, as portals, Sina.com, Netease.com, Sohu.com and China.com all pay close attention to the stock market, and provide charts of Shanghai Stock Exchange Index and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Index.

Let's talk about the financial channels of various websites first. Compared with finance and economics, we can always pay attention to a wide range of contents, such as the Yinguangsha incident, China's entry into WTO, APEC meeting, the US 9. 1 1, the Federal Reserve's interest rate cut, the Sino-Japanese trade war and so on. All websites have actively reported on this and commented on its impact on the economy, and some websites have also published some special topics. Among them, Sina. Com, Sohu. Com and China. Com have performed well, and each website has its own advantages in reporting various events. Netease lags behind the other three companies in this respect, and its financial homepage has no information about world stock market index and Chinese concept stocks. I don't know if it is affected by delisting. In addition, Sohu. Com provides a comprehensive ranking of price increases and decreases, and lists the top five price increases and the top five price decreases in great detail, which is more clear and detailed for investors.

Science and technology channel

The content of Sina.com is comprehensive and detailed, such as Internet-domestic, Internet-international, popular science and technology, popular science news and software news. There are not only special articles like other websites, but also some columns of scientific and technological elites, which can be said to be a major feature.

Netease's science and technology channel is relatively single, with popular science and other sections. The content of the science and technology channel is very practical. For example, the software tutorial is reflected on the home page of the channel, so people can know whether they need to browse this section at a glance, and the content is updated quickly, such as the update of the downloaded version of the software.

Sohu Science and Technology Channel contains less other scientific and technological content, so Sohu named IT IT Channel. Look carefully at the content arrangement of this channel. In the 12 section at the bottom of the home page, there is only one section of Vientiane, and other sections are only related to it.

Compared with the other three websites, China. Com's technology channel has no obvious advantages, and there are also some problems in the design of its technology channel home page. There are two hardware squares on the home page, although one is channel navigation and the other is to recommend specific excellent articles. In the software part, the words download base only appeared in the navigation bar above, and the software update is not as good as other websites.

The four websites are all good in the content of science and technology channels, but they all focus more on the technology of IT industry. In terms of popular science, Sina.com and China.com give us a deeper impression.

Video shrew

Women's channel is a very vague and clear topic. The reason why it is vague is that women also involve entertainment, games, occupations, health and other contents, and it is unreasonable to separate a female channel by classification. But it is obvious that everyone knows what the content of the women's channel will be: beauty, clothing, marriage and love. But it is very strange, why is there no corresponding male channel? Don't men need clothes, and marriage is just a woman's business? Probably because of this suspicion, China.com did not set up a special channel for women at all, and the corresponding content was scattered to other channels. Sina, Sohu and Netease, the three female channels, have similar contents, including clothing, beauty, fitness, love, sex and horoscope. And each website has little unique content.

Sina is good at news topics, and the women's channel has also inherited this advantage, and launched "very focused" topics, from "Analysis of Ten Handsome Constellations" to "Interview Records of Prostitutes". Although it is not timely, it is definitely a title that can attract people to visit this channel. The channel content is clearly divided, and the theme is very intuitive and easy to find.

Netease's female channel is sensational, and its content is also sensational, but the columns and article titles are as evasive as Xiaojiabiyu, which makes people unable to understand and know what to say. The news in this column often collides with the news in other columns. Talking about Ying Da's marriage together, I feel that the 5 million lottery prize has separated the couple by half. Netease has little expertise in the subject.

Sohu's women's channel has a city life search, which can provide commodity market information and is quite unique. The entertainment taste of the channel is relatively heavy and the sense of leisure is very strong. Actually, the women's channel should be changed to a leisure channel.

Automatic channel

There are many friends who like cars, some like to enjoy them, and some plan to buy them themselves, so auto channel is more important for a big portal. However, after we evaluated the auto channel of these four famous domestic websites, we got disappointing results. Although the website provides a lot of information, it is hard to see any practical significance. A large number of articles are public relations, with many boastful elements. In addition, some of the latest network technologies, such as real-time three-dimensional display technology, have not been seen on these websites. Generally speaking, the production of this channel by these four websites is still in a very general stage.

Auto channel of these four websites has a remarkable feature, that is, they tend to introduce middle and high-end cars. From this point of view, it seems to be more in line with the tastes of those who like to appreciate and study cars, but in fact, these websites do not closely combine car photos with performance introduction and other related information, and all kinds of content are distributed in confusion. Some car introduction links pop up blank pages without content after clicking.

For those friends who are going to buy a car, the content provided by these websites is even more meaningless, and the car quotation system is extremely rough. For example, in Netease's product supply and demand information, we searched for new cars, but we got a whole 1 page of used car news. Another example is the automobile market in China. Com, the manufacturer's quotation and personal quotation are mixed together, and it is impossible to find the required content directly. What surprises us even more is that we can actually see the Porsche 9 11Carrera 4 convertible with a price of1ten thousand yuan here. We don't know whether it's true or not.

The only commendable thing is that Sina's car price comparison system and car purchase cost calculation system still have certain advantages in practicality and credibility. However, in general, Sina. Com, like the other three websites, can't provide a comprehensive and real car buying environment for the public.

Health channel

When it comes to the health channels of the four major websites, we can't help but mention Sanjiu Health Network (www.999.com.cn). Sanjiu Health Network, as the pioneer of Sanjiu Group to enter the network, was officially opened in April 2000. Relying on the powerful strength of Sanjiu Enterprise Group, it quickly became famous on the Internet, and successively signed cooperation agreements with Sina.com, Sohu.com and FM365. We can see that after this, these portals have been at the forefront of the health channels of various portals, whether in content or type, whether in information or on-site health services. In particular, Sina simply "mixed" its own health channel with Sanjiu Health Network, and Zhuoyu's position is unique.

Netease's way is to find another way. Its health channels are divided into three categories: medical guide, sexual health care and family health. Except for a few articles translated from foreign websites or reprinted from traditional newspapers and periodicals, most of the selected contents come from a medical website in Hubei "Maxima Pharmaceutical" (www.drugsky.com.cn). Although slightly inferior to Sina and Sohu, it is also quite distinctive.

China Com is divided into health care, gender, fitness, beauty, psychology, mother and baby, medicine and other categories. Its information sources are more complex and diverse, which almost makes people suspect that the channel has a hobby of "maliciously collecting" domestic and foreign health reports.

Entertainment channel

The first impression of the entertainment channel is that the positioning is too biased. Each family focuses on entertainment content reporting and establishes entertainment channels. More than 90% of the main content is all kinds of reports about the entertainment circle. The content is still relatively good and the collection is relatively complete. But if a place full of entertainment anecdotes is called an entertainment channel, does it need to give new meaning to the entertainment of the public?

In addition to the positioning deviation, the content is still good, but it is difficult to make any comparison, because the content of each family will not be much different, basically it is some news in the entertainment circle, including almost artist news, movie news, music news, movie release time, music album release time and even all kinds of lace news in the entertainment circle. However, it is not surprising that the entertainment industry can't live without it at any time. Without these, their attraction will be much less. Although the content of each family is well collected and there is no obvious problem in doing it, there is still a common problem, that is, there is suspicion of malicious speculation, and some attractive titles, such as "shocking the world", are often used, and then a word "picture" is attached. In fact, the content of the report and the attached drawings are very common, which may be a special means for the website to attract public browsing.

Generally speaking, it seems more appropriate to call the entertainment channels of the four major websites audio-visual channels. If used as audio-visual channels, these four companies are still doing very well.

Game channel

In terms of game channels, Sina's game world should be the best, with a wide range of content, including almost all game-related content. There are game news, mini-games, download centers, popular game topics, raiders' cheats, online game topics, manufacturer zones that cooperate with manufacturers, customer service forums of various manufacturers, and popular tramp tribe forums, and all kinds of reports are very timely. In addition, Sina often holds various activities, such as the heroine draft of Dinosaur Crisis 2 in cooperation with UBI.

Netease seems to pay more attention to Online games, which may be related to Netease's launch of "A Chinese Odyssey Online". Netease's game channel content collection is also quite complete, and many popular games have special special coverage areas. In addition to computer games, Netease also has a special TV game column, which specifically reports home TV/handheld game consoles such as PS/PS2/DC/GB/GBA.

Game channels of Sohu and China. Com are relatively dull, and the content collection is as complete as expected. There is not much worth mentioning in terms of functions, but there are many industry news, various patch downloads, hot game topics and forums. However, Sohu's page is very distinctive, with a black background and colorful game pictures on it, which are very eye-catching and give people strong visual stimulation.

Characteristic content

Based on the service contents of the four websites, it should be said that they have made some efforts in this respect, and all have their own characteristics, which can be regarded as different. For example, the stars in Sina fan zone, the online education center of Netease, the home bus of Chinaren in Sohu, and the online hospital in China are all worthy of recommendation.

Sina.com

There are no special columns listed on Sina's page, but after careful browsing, we think there are still many special places in Sina. Typical examples are the fan zone, the Sina version of Sunshine TV, which cooperates with Sunshine TV, and the mobile phone service, among which the most distinctive column should promote the stars in their fan zone. This column is an entertainment forum, which contains a lot of entertainment information and gathers fans. It is also a network theme community specially prepared for people who love stars and entertainment. Here, you can find like-minded friends who admire the stars, get to know your favorite stars and collect a lot of pictures. The stars here are not only movie stars in real life, but also various admirable stars, including sports stars, anime stars, heroes and so on. You can find it no matter how old you die. At present, there are nearly a thousand star clubs in Sina Starlight Unlimited, and there are still many to be built. For many fans, a theme is indeed the most admirable feature column of Sina.

Netease

Netease's featured content has direct links on their homepage, including daily weather forecast, wonderful software download, Netease Education Center, Netease word of mouth, tourist attractions inquiry, free domain name system, daily casual games and so on. Netease's special content is nothing special, but it can be said to be very practical. Perhaps practicality is the original intention of Netease's featured content. Many of them are content services that other websites don't have, such as "Daily Weather Forecast". Many people only get information from other information sources online, and they don't know whether it is cold or warm, rainy or sunny. Making weather forecast on the internet just lets netizens know the weather changes in time. Free domain name has always been a strong service of Netease and a traditional feature. Netease Education Center provides online education information, and there are some online education services that cooperate with famous schools, such as Peking University Law School and National People's Congress Online School. Other contents are different, but Netease's word-of-mouth ICQ service is nothing new.

Sohu

Sohu's characteristic content should be regarded as some original content they acquired from Chinaren website, mainly including homepage bus, alumni record and personal homepage selection. Although Chinaren was acquired by Sohu, these contents are still well done, and they are also some content services that are very close to users. Homepage Bus is a wizard service for homepage making, which can teach a user who knows nothing about homepage making to make a simple personal homepage step by step and store it on the network. Needless to say, the use of alumni records is not particularly popular here, and it seems that there are not as many classes and registered alumni as there are in China alumni records. Personal homepage selection is to show you the best products in the personal homepage that uses its domain name and space.

China com

China's website also lists many special contents. Com, up to 12 items, including Destiny Sky, online hospital, hilarious X files, electronic map, psychological test, academic examination, game back to the valley, integral prizes, download base and desktop wall.