It looks like a way to sort-of link to a site, but to make the default action to return back to the linking site instead of going deeper into the other site. Yo

It looks like a way to sort-of link to a site, but to make the default action to return back to the linking site instead of going deeper into the other site. You aren't sending people to the target page, but are just loading a preview. As the target website, even if your analytics show a visit, it might not be a full visit. 15 years ago, it was common for website owners to ask you to "make all links open in a frame" so that the original site could keep a frame on top of all the other content. That was probably only stopped by JavaScript snippets to break out of frames. Portals is the same kind of idea -- give power to the sites that link out (like Google) at the expense of the smaller sites that receive links.