A web portal is a web site that brings together information from diverse sources in a unified 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.

Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, and Yahoo!.

In the late 1990s the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web browsers in the late-1990s many companies tried to build or acquire a portal to have a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, IBM and others launched Prodigy, and Excite and @Home became a part of AT&T during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies, such as CBS.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He was one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history, and whose teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to classification of what he called human races of which he determined five.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was born at his house in Gotha, studied medicine at Jena, and then Göttingen. He graduated from the latter in 1775 with his M.D. thesis De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind, University of Göttingen, which was first published in 1775, then re-issued with changes to the title-page in 1776). It is considered one of the most influential works in the development of subsequent concepts of "human races." It contained the germ of the craniological researches to which so many of his subsequent inquiries were directed.

He was appointed extraordinary professor of medicine and inspector of the museum of natural history in Göttingen in 1776 and ordinary professor in 1778. He soon began to enrich the pages of the Medicinische Bibliothek, of which he was editor from 1780 to 1794, with various contributions on medicine, physiology, and anatomy. In physiology, he was of the school of Haller, and was in the habit of illustrating his theory by a careful comparison of the animal functions of man with those of other animals.