The portal concept is this year's buzzword, with Microsoft, Netscape, Excite and Compaq's AltaVista among the major constructors of sites offering a one-stop shop of content, free e-mail, and search facilities, encouraging users to base their Web activities with them.

Alliances and mergers of content providers, search engines and e-mail services have been taking place at a ferocious rate in the States, and little thought has been given to grabbing the "eyeballs" the portals are seeking outside the huge American market.

Excite shows it cares

Excite launched the first personalised web service for the UK, My Excite, in November last year and on Thursday announced "the first free Web-based e-mail service from a global Web portal company, localised for Web users in Europe."

The service is available immediately in the UK and will be introduced in Germany and France in the next few weeks.

It may seem a cosmetic exercise to many Net users in Britain, with free e-mail already generally available.

But the patriotic among them may prefer a .uk suffix to their e-mail addresses rather than .com and Excite is showing it is at least thinking about its audience outside America.

The company is also striking first before Yahoo's expected announcement of My Yahoo for the UK. Yahoo already has a localised UK and Ireland site, which 70% of the UK's 8.7 million Internet users have visited, according to a new NOP survey.

Microsoft's MSN Start site allows UK personalisation and My Netscape for the UK is expected to appear later this year.