In 1998, the largely underutilized MSN.com domain name was reinvented as both an Internet portal and as a brand for a family of sites produced inside Microsoft's Interactive Media Group. The new site put MSN in direct competition with sites such as Yahoo! and Go Network. Because the new format opened up MSN's content to the world for free, the Internet service provider and subscription service was renamed "MSN Internet Access" at that time.
The relaunched MSN.com contained a whole family of sites, including original content, channels that were carried over from web shows that were part of the "MSN 2.0" experiment (although none of the actual shows remained), and new features that were rapidly added. MSN.com also became a successor to the default Internet Explorer start page, as all of the previous "Microsoft Internet Start" web site was merged with MSN.com.
Since then, MSN.com has remained a popular destination, launching many web services and new content sites. MSN's Hotmail and Messenger services were promoted from the MSN.com portal, which provided a central place for all of MSN's content and related web sites. MSN Search, a dedicated search engine for the portal, launched in 1999. The MSN.com portal and related group of services under the "MSN" umbrella remained largely the same throughout much of the next decade.
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