Once you identified yourself to your portal of choice in order to claim your “excite.com” email address, the site now knew your name, your general geographic location, your age, your sex, and tons of individual preferences. Sure, the portals claimed that all of this was in the interest of providing useful info like local weather conditions, personalized headlines and stock quotes. But the reality, of course, was that they now had the holy grail of marketing: demographic data to target ads against. This served to turbo-boost the advertising revenues the search sites were already generating.
