Does the web need another portal?
    Apparently so, as a number of companies continue to attract users in what would seem already an overcrowded field.
   One of the more recent wannabees, Gohip.com, has been successful enough to find itself at the top of the latest list of web gainers from Media Metrix.
   The irritatingly titled L.A.-based portal was the No. 1 gainer for the week ending May 14.
    GoHip.com is a so-called "meta-search" engine, allowing users to search a variety of search engines at once.
    Gainers are ranked by percent increase in traffic over the average traffic from the previous three weeks.    
    Gohip.com doubled its traffic from the week ending May 7 to the week ending May 14, and rests at the top of the gainers list with a 143.3 percent increase.
    Gohip.com far outperformed the rest of the week’s gainers. No. 2 Shopnow.com posted a percent increase of 124.1 but this was marred by roller-coaster performance that does not imply any continued growth trend.
     Shopnow.com, a shopping portal, saw a drastic increase from 49,000 to 182,000 users from the week ending May 7 to the week ending May 14. The week ending April 30, however, Shopnow.com had had 93,000 users.
    Gainer No. 3 was Flyswat.com, which had also been No. 3 on the previous week’s list of top 10 gainers. The NBCi-owned Flyswat.com offers users a specialized browser tool that automatically creates hyperlinks to relevant information on any web page a user is looking at.
     It will be very interesting to see if Flyswat can continue its growth and prove that a new generation of browser tools can reach a mainstream audience.
    Another site worth watching on this week’s list is MyFamily.com, No. 9 with a 79.4 increase.
    MyFamily.com is a site through which families can establish private online communities where they can share news, post photographs, chat online and create family trees. Its concerns are decidedly mainstream and non-technical; the site itself was founded by a 57-year-old grandmother.
    And finally it seems that all the publicity being generated lately by Napster, the music-sharing software company perpetually ensnared in legal trouble, is paying off in terms of traffic. Napster.com, climbing steadily in recent weeks, placed No. 6 on the gainers list for the week with a traffic increase of nearly 100 percent.

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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