Sharing data should mean making it easy for people to find content wherever they are already looking for data. While portals are useful centralized repositories - imagine if open data was part of the existing government websites, or even in community sites, blogs, and other outreach.
The embedded search can be simple, or customized and styled like above. It can also be configured to limit the search to specific ArcGIS Open Data groups. For example to limit to only 20 results from the DC Education data:
<script src="http://esridc.github.io/opendata-search-component/dist/opendata-search.js"></script>
<opendata-search
api="http://opendata.arcgis.com"
limit="20"
sort="relevance"
group="62be2f179f674941b393f1c9bc8ca73e"
fields="record_count, item_type"></opendata-search>