The ground floor, surmounted by a parapet, has at the middle a big portal with a tympanum.

At first, all of the big portals wanted to deal directly with advertisers, rather than agencies, in hopes of selling multimillion-dollar "strategic partnerships."

NBCi, by contrast, continues to add features and technology in order to try to beat the bigger portals at their own game.

The first of its kind in China, it is, as of 2009, the biggest portal for legal downloading of music in the country.

Cassie then appears through a big glowing portal.

They floated together downward to the big portal, untagged the outer door, and went inside.

Yahoo and Excite are two fo the biggest portals.

Grimly, Susan crawled to the lip of the big portal and stared out over the smoking ground before her.

"Heading for that big portal on the other side, I bet."

AOL will also have to scrabble with the other big portals for ad dollars.