What are the types of portals?

Thank you all for your particpation, below you can find The different types of portals and their characteristics:

1. Access portal :  Associated with ISP

2. Horizontal or functional portal: Offers a range of services; for example search engines, directories, news, recruitment, personal information management, shopping (Yahoo!)

3. Vertical portal: Covers a particular market, such as construction, with news and other services

4. Media portal: Main focus on consumer or business news

5. Geographical portal: May be horizontal or vertical

6. Marketplace portal: May be horizontal, vertical or geographical

7. Search portal: Main focus is on search (Google, Ask ..etc)

8. Media type portal: May be voice or video and delivered by streaming media or download of files (Youtube , Viemo ..etc)

Search engines act as one of the most popular types of web portals. All an Internet user has to do is search for a certain topic, issue or problem, and potentially millions of pages show up as a result of the search query. The user then clicks on the link found, and a new site is discovered. Search engines aggregate new sites frequently, which means new sites can show up every day

Internet navigation sites, such as Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek, AOL, MSN, Netscape Netcenter and Lycos, represented the next phase of portal development. The term "Internet portal" (or "web portal") began to be used to describe these mega-sites because many users used them as a "starting point" for their web surfing. The term "search engine" had become inadequate to describe the breadth of the offerings, although search and navigation are still pivotal to most people's online experience. Compared to the original Internet search engines, Internet portals offer a more structured, navigable interface. Browsing an organized hierarchy of categories developed by people (rather than computers) who scoured the Internet for relevant and useful Websites is more effective than issuing a keyword search against the entire Web.

Thank you for inviting. I think portal is general word. It can be a website , intranet portal or any other development for the web. Below are the types

• Web searching portals
• E-commerceself service portal
• Business intelligence portals
• e learning portals
• communication portals

 and many more.