Whenever someone uses the word ‘portal’, I always glance at the calendar nervously to make sure it's not still 2006. Luckily it almost always becomes apparent that they meant to say ‘website’ and have no clue what a ‘portal’ is.
In India we refer to most government websites as portals, even the very recent ones. I have no idea why because "website" is used for private websites regularly
Wait, what is a portal, then, and where are you getting that definition from? I have been a web dev for a decade and I also understand a "portal" to be a broadly applicable term meaning basically any webapp that grants access to some data. Did it once have some narrower meaning, in times long past before I was a dev?
I've always taken it to be a portion of a website that takes you onward to different areas of the website. Like, at least in Wikipedia, a portal is generally a list of links to areas related to a topic. In sales software, a sales portal generally leads you to areas in the website like sales flows, or something else.
Around Y2K, a portal was a web-page that linked to assorted on- and off-site resources; the Yahoo! front page was a portal. It was a kind of aggregator, and commonly the off-site content would display within the portal site (don't let them navigate away from our site!)
The term "Portal" was hijacked by the video game in 2007!