Along with the development and success of international personal portals such as Yahoo!, regional variants have also sprung up. Some regional portals contain local information such as weather forecasts, street maps and local business information. Another notable expansion over the past couple of years is the move into formerly unthinkable markets.

Such a portal is -A property portal that brings together property from all over the county of Monmouthshire to make househunting in that county a far simpler task. The user simply goes to www.HousesForSaleInMonmouthshire.co.uk to view over a thousand properties for sale in that area from the area's estate agents.

"Local content - global reach" portals have emerged not only from countries like Korea (Naver), India (Rediff), China (Sina.com), Romania(Neogen.ro), Greece(in.gr) and Italy (Webplace.it), but in countries like Vietnam where they are very important for learning how to apply e-commerce, e-government, etc. Such portals reach out to the widespread diaspora across the world.

At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. In the United States the main portal is USA.gov, in addition to portals developed for specific audiences such as DisabilityInfo.gov; in the United Kingdom the main portals are Directgov (for citizens) and businesslink.gov.uk (for businesses).

Many U.S. states have their own portals which provide direct access to eCommerce applications (e.g., Hawaii Business Express and myIndianaLicense), agency and department web sites, and more specific information about living in, doing business in and getting around the state.

Many U.S. states have chosen to out-source the operation of their portals to third-party vendors. One company that is an example of this is NICUSA which runs 21 state portals is the National Portal of India provides comprehensive, accurate, reliable and up-to-date information about India and its various facets.

One of the issues that comes up with government web portals is that different agencies often have their own portals and sometimes a statewide portal-directory structure is not sophisticated and deep enough to meet the needs of multiple agencies.

Corporate intranets gained popularity during the 1990s. Having access to a variety of company information via a web browser was a new way of working. Intranets quickly grew in size and complexity, and webmasters (many of whom lacked the discipline of managing content and users) became overwhelmed in their duties. It wasn't enough to have a consolidated view of company information, users were demanding personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet.

The 1990s were a time of innovation for the concept of corporate web portals. Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Some portal solutions today are able to integrate legacy applications, other portals objects, and handle thousands of user requests.

Today’s corporate portals are sprouting new value-added capabilities for businesses. Capabilities such as managing workflows, increasing collaboration between work groups, and allowing content creators to self-publish their information are lifting the burden off already strapped IT departments.

In addition, most portal solutions today, if architected correctly, can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or Single-Sign-On.

JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions.

Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server line of products have been gaining popularity among corporations for building their portals, partly due to the tight integration with the rest of the Microsoft Office products. Research by Forrester Research in 2004 shows that Microsoft is the vendor of choice for companies looking for portal server software[1].

In response to Microsoft's strong presence in the portal market, other portal vendors are being acquired, or are challenging their offering. Oracle Corporation, in 2007, released Web Center Suite, a similar product to SharePoint. Web Center Suite has a full line of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, team spaces, calendaring, email, etc.). IBM recently revamped WebSphere.

In addition, the popularity of content aggregation is growing and portal solution will continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the enterprise mash-up concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.

With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silo's, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating adhoc navigation and information flows.

Some useful lessons can be learned from web 2.0 applications such as Netvibes, PageFlakes, Protopage and a new breed of competitors, such as PersonAll, use this angle to enter the market.