Is web portal was difference with website?

My lecturer have ask us in class about that question.Nobody can answer this correctly..
So, I is good if I share with you about what is the web portal actually...

A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Examples of public web portals are MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, iGoogle and Netvibes.

Types of web portals

Horizontal vs. vertical portal
Two broad categorizations of portals are horizontal portals, which cover many areas, and vertical portals, which are focused on one functional area. Another definition for a horizontal portal is, that it's used as platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors.A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.

Personal portals
A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phones. Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Information or content that you are putting on the internet creates a portal, or a path to new knowledge and/or capabilities.

Regional web portals
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.
"Local content - global reach" portals have emerged not only from countries like Korea (Naver), India (Rediff), China (Sina.com), Romania, Greece (in.gr) and Italy, 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.

Government web portals
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 English and GobiernoUSA.gov in Spanish in addition to portals developed for specific audiences such as Disability.gov; in the United Kingdom the main portals are Directgov (for citizens) and businesslink.gov.uk (for businesses).The official web portal of the European Union is Europa (web portal). Europa links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences.All relevant health topics from across Europe are gathered in the Health-EU portal.

Corporate web portals
Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted 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.
Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. Most 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.
The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.[citation needed]
With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, 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 ad hoc navigation and information flows.
Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities.

So, I hope all my classmate will be more clear what is differences between web portal and website.