Types of Websites

For reference, a list of different types of websites one may find in the world wide web.

Search Engines

Search engines are websites for searching for other websites, webpages, or other things on the web.

Some search engines are: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Yandex, Qwant.

Specialized Search Engines

An image search engine is a type of search engine that searches for images on the web based on a text description of the image. A reverse image search engine does the opposite: you already have the image, and you upload it to the engine so it can find you other webpages that have that image, or similar images.

TinEye is a a specialized reverse image search engne. Google and Bing also provide this feature in their image search.

Blogs

A blog (short for "web log") is a website where someone posts things that happened in their lives which displays the posts in chronological manner by default. It's like an online diary. Blogs can also be used to post updates and announcements about a product or service.

Blogs often allow random Internet users reading a blog post to comment on it. This feature is often abused by spam bots who post spam comments everywhere, so many well-maintained blogs are moderated, which means they won't display a comment immediately on the blog page, first the author has to take a look on it.

News Websites

A news website is a kind of blogging website that publishes news of some kind, where every blog post is actually a news article. Generally, this refers to an actual news organization that has a website, but there are also news websites that only exist to report news reported by someone else.

Forums

An online forum is a website where users can create an account to talk with other users about some subject. Some forums are dedicated to a specific subject, product, or service, while other forums are multi-topic.

In general, to start talking about a topic, an user has to create a first post called a "thread" with a title that refers to its topic, e.g. "what are some types of websites?" and then and other users will be able to reply to it, and then reply to each other's replies.

Forums typically only display the titles of the threads in their main pages, not each individual post, so you need to navigate to the thread to see what people are saying.

Portfolio Websites

Many individuals have their own website to showcase their work, their portfolio, some also including other personal information for potential employers.

Institutional Websites

Many businesses, brands, and other organizations have something similar to portfolio websites, called an institutional website, that showcases their products, their staff, what projects they're involved with, their history, their mission, and so on.

For example, https://about.google/ is the URL for Google's institutional website.

Blogging software is also used by organizations to publish announcements, and by news organizations to publish their news reports, as all of these benefit from the chronological sorting.

Social Media

A social media website is a type of website that allows users to post and share some sort of "content" between themselves, comment on each other's posts, and form relationships with users or communities by subscribing to their posts or by joining groups of users to have a feed of posts from those specific users in the website.

The major social media websites are: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and a network of websites running Mastodon, Misskey, and other decentralized social media software called the Fediverse.

Wikis

A wiki is a type of informative website similar to the Wikipedia website.