Most of these sites are portals and search engines. A portal is a starting point for your "surfing" experience. Its primary purpose is to link to other sites, organizing them by topic. Most portals also offer a variety of services. At Yahoo!, for example, they provide stock quotes, news, free e-mail, online board & card games, as well as a host of other services.

A search engine is a web site you use to find stuff. If you were looking for a company's web site, you could go to a search engine and type in that company's name, and it would return a list of web pages that contain that name.