Difference between Search Engine and Portal

Search Engine

The Search engine is a program which is designed to enable the users to browse information or content on World Wide Web. It helps retrieve the desired information in minimum time. It allows you to input specific keywords or phrases and retrieves a list of items matching those keywords and phrases. Thus, it does not provide information straight away; it just retrieves pages which are related to keywords or other search terms. Some of the popular search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search.

Portal

Portal is a private location on the internet which acts as a point of access to the information available on the World Wide Web. A portal is accessed through a unique URL, unique username and password, i.e. apart from URL, personal login is required to see the content on a portal. Some of the popular portals are facebook.com, gmail.com and twitter.com.