[jfoster]

Except that this is a very different approach to being a portal.

Yahoo filled their front-page with items that wouldn't be relevant except for some tiny percentage of the time, such that even if the front page had what you were looking for, it was like a needle in a haystack. Google's approach here is only revealing the portal functionality in response to a specific request for it. It won't kill them, and may even be a competitive advantage for them over any competitor search engine that has superior ranking algorithms.