one of the websites that has been

• The Inventory

100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It

The World Wide Web is officially old enough for us judge what it’s produced. That’s right, it’s time for the world to start building a canon of the most significant websites of all time, and the Gizmodo staff has opinions.

What does a spot on this list mean? It certainly doesn’t mean “best.” A number of sites on this list are cesspools now and always have been. We’re not even sure the internet was a good idea—we’ll need another few decades before we come to any conclusions. In this case, we set out to rank the websites—not apps (like Instagram), not services (like PayPal)—that influenced the very nature of the internet, changed the world, stole ideas better than anyone, pioneered a genre, or were just really important to us. Some of these sites seemed perfectly arbitrary a decade ago and turned into monstrous destinations or world-destroying monopolies. Other sites have been net positives for humanity and gave us a glimpse of what can happen when the world works together. In many ways this list is an evaluation of power and who has seized it. In other ways, it’s an appreciation of the places that still make the web worth surfing.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s first proposal to CERN outlining what he originally called the “WorldWideWeb” (one word). Since then, Berners-Lee has had a few regrets about what’s become a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, and who knows what the future holds. Below you’ll find our somewhat arbitrary idea of the virtual destinations that mattered most, ranked and curated by the Gizmodo staff and illustrated with screenshots that exemplify their history, as we’ve played, shared, fought, and meme’d our way into the current millennium.

100. Blingee (2006)

Blingee is a form of art. Who would we be, if not for the sparkles, shimmering text, and rotating pot leaves it allowed us to barf all over our MySpace profile pictures? It’s not a gif, it’s not a photo: it’s the Harry Potter photograph version of a scrapbook page made by your wine aunt and goth tween cousin. Inexplicably—but thank GOD—people are still making Blingees and uploading stickers to the site. We are all better for it.

99. I Can Has Cheezburger (2007)

The site that launched a million mom memes.

98. MeetUp (2002)

As far as startups go, MeetUp has to be at the top of the list of a good idea that turned out pretty lame. The concept of getting people with common interests offline and together in real life was a solid one, but it came at a time when people were getting far more comfortable with saying “fuck real life.” These days, it holds some niche interest for hobbyists and people who like to network in their profession. Though it’s one of the few sites that can make LinkedIn look cool, the promise it represented earns it a place in history.

97. Goatse (1999)

Dare you to look at it, for old time’s sake .

96. RuneScape (2001)

One of the best games to play in the early 2000s if your parents refused to pay for video games or an expensive computer, the once browser-based MMORPG’s blocky, low-powered graphics and grinding gameplay gave it an endearing charm that distinguished it from the big boys on the block. Though better-looking versions, unshackled from the browser, have since debuted, more people still actually play Old-School Runescape, a version meant to resemble Runescape as it was in 2007.

95. WhoSampled (2008)

WhoSampled’s mission couldn’t be simpler: identifying when and from where musicians sampled the work of others. When researching a single song or musical phrase, it’s a boon. Dive into the endless network of samples, remixes, and other connections that follow, and you’ll find yourself in the kind of internet k-hole that can only be escaped from by logging off entirely.

94. The Sartorialist (2005)

This trail-blazing fashion blog was among the first to use the internet to charge past the gate-keeping glossies. The Sartoralist showcased the street style of (mostly) non-models and pioneered the notion that regular, non-famous folks with great fashion sense were just as inspirational as polished celebrities on the red carpet. For better or for worse, this blog arguably paved the way for the social media-influencer fashion culture of today.

93. Club Penguin (2005)

They finally flipped that goddamn iceberg .

92. The Toast (2013)

This gem of a feminist satire site only lived for three years, but it launched careers, garnered an obsessively devoted fanbase, and saved a life (for real, someone matched with a live kidney donor in the comments section of The Toast). Founders Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Mallory Ortberg created a space that took the female experience seriously enough to then satirize it. The blog took on topics immediately recognizable to readers—imposter’s syndrome, male “feminists” who secretly believe they’re smarter than women, women having a terrible time at parties—and mixed them with truly bonkers blogs imagining the pitch meeting for PBS’s “Wishbone.” It was one of the smartest, kindest, purest places online, and we’re so sad it’s gone.

91. PizzaNet (1994)

In 1994, Pizza Hut’s PizzaNet became what is widely credited as the very first place a consumer could purchase a physical product over the World Wide Web. Though that’s not exactly true, it was the first major push for an online market place and it foreshadowed the era of Seamless. Millions of drunk people looking at their bank statements the next morning have PizzaNet to thank for their regrets.

90. Stack Overflow (2008)

The website where you can find anything you need to know about building a website. If you have a question about coding, odds are the answer is already on Stack Overflow. And if it isn’t, some generous soul will get you a solution almost as soon as you ask for it.

89. SomethingAwful (1999)

While Something Awful had its moments as a host for various bits of comedy, rants, and reviews, SA’s community is its real legacy. From its forums, Something Awful members gave birth to the legend of Slenderman, an entire new genre of videos in Let’s Plays, and thanks to offshoots like the Goonswarm, SA was indirectly responsible for some of the most massive (and costly) space battles ever witnessed in video game history. It was also, uh, actually awful .

88. Electronic Frontier Foundation (1990)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is probably best known for defending digital rights around the world since 1990, but the non-profit’s website, and its DeepLinks blog in particular, has also become a tremendous resource. EFF now does everything from publishing investigative journalism to distribute downloadable tools like the Privacy Badger. And the internet is better for it.

87. Bandcamp (2008)

The internet’s Big Promise has always centered on its ability to give power back to the little guy. Bandcamp is one place that actually made good . By giving artists the ability to not only publish their music but to sell it straight to fans, Bandcamp has allowed independent musicians to earn more than $300 million . In the 10 years it’s been active, the site has also served as a beginning point for weird internet subcultures and microgenres, including vaporwave , computergaze , and future funk . Bandcamp is meant for artists, but it’s just as vital for music fans.

86. Crunchyroll (2006)

From its early days as a streaming site for East Asian dramas to becoming the western home of anime hits like My Hero Academia and Dragon Ball Super , Crunchyroll is pretty much the de facto source of Anime for many western fans. With the anime industry still struggling to deal with how to handle a global reach for shows, its role in offering official sources fans beyond Japan can use to support their favorite shows is vital. Shame their video player still sucks though.

85. DuckDuckGo (2008)

Nobody with the capacity for self-awareness says they just “duckduckgo’d” something as shorthand for searching online. But the privacy-centric search engine, powered by a relatively small but growing dedicated user base, keeps alive a gleaming reminder that privacy is possible on the internet, that not every company is a data-sucking vampire, and that there is still a way to find what you’re looking for online without piling more money into Google’s gold-plated coffers.

84. Friendster (2002)

You might not remember this, but before there was Facebook, there was a site that did many of the same things Facebook did, except it was more fun. That was Friendster. Even though it was basically just a copycat, Facebook killed Friendster, and now Friendster is dead. RIP Friendster.

83. HaveIBeenPwned (2013)

After a series of major data breaches, security expert Troy Hunt decided to make a website where potential victims could check and see if their data had been compromised. Now, you just type in your email address, click “have i been pwned?” and see the hackers got you. (Fun fact: Gizmodo’s original parent company, Gawker, was one of the original five hacks indexed!)

82. New York Times (1996)

It’s really difficult to name the best, most important, or most influential news website in history. It’s hard to even determine what the first news website was. News is simply one of the fundamental backbones of web content and it’s everywhere. The Times website has been a reliable place for news since 1996, and it has attempted new ways to deliver it along the way. It takes our honorary mention for the category until its op-ed board eventually pushes us too far.

81. wikiHow (2005)

If you’re wondering how to, say, cut a mango , wikiHow is a consistently useful resource, providing surprisingly detailed step-by-step guides. The genius of the site, however, comes from its innumerable, seemingly SEO-driven oddities. Want to know how to hold a dachshund properly or act like a mermaid at school ? WikiHow has you covered.

80. Ask Jeeves (1996)

Too good for its time, Ask Jeeves was an OG: the Original Google. Ask kids these days about Jeeves, though, and they’re bound to look at you all crazy. RIP.

79. Genius (2009)

Genius started as Rap Genius, a platform to annotate hip-hop lyrics. But in a spark of brilliance, it expanded in 2015 to allow people to annotate a wider scope of content, from personal blogs to the Washington Post . Unfortunately, it also created a new way to be a dick and kind of broke the internet . But it sure is nifty!

78. Drudge Report (1995)

A year before Fox News injected conservative media with steroids, Drudge Report was outlining the propaganda playbook. It broke the news that Newsweek was sitting on the Bill Clinton-Monika Lewinsky scandal and kicked off a new age when gossip blogs nudged or sucker-punched stories into the public eye. Since then, Drudge Report has provided a glimpse into the raw, paranoid id of the American right-wing brain. We are in no way better off.

77. Fan Fiction (1998)

Fandom was once reserved for real-life meetups and zines printed in garages. The internet allowed fans to create stories and put them all over Usenet and in carefully cultivated repositories on sites like Geocities and Angelfire. Ff.net changed everything by creating a single repository for fic from every fandom. It’s never been perfect—fans revolted when it got rid of explicit fic (porn) to appease advertisers, but it proved that fandoms no longer needed to sit in walled gardens and could finally coexist.

76. Rotten (1997)

In the days of the early internet, Rotten.com was where people went to see revolting images—both fake and real—of stuff like maggot-ridden cadavers, dead celebrities, and Tubgirl. Shit that would make your stomach churn, and because at the time people didn’t really have any expectations for what decency on the world wide web was supposed to be, there wasn’t really anyone around to tell them stop. (Though a handful tried.) Rotten was not a site you visited—just knowing that this repository of shocking and evil content existed was enough.

75. Project Gutenberg (1994)

With 57,000 public domain titles and counting, Project Gutenberg was the first digital library, offering free e-books online decades before the Kindle Store was even a thought. And while Google Books has far eclipsed the volunteer-run archive in terms of volume, Project Gutenberg’s meticulously assembled texts are often much higher quality. Did we mention it’s absolute treasure trove of golden age sci-fi?

74. Pandora (2000)

Pandora’s personalized internet radio service, launched in the early 2000s, marked the beginning of the streaming era. And in those first few years, its Music Genome Project, which customized users’ stations around the qualities of the music, felt revolutionary. Ultimately, however, Pandora may be remembered more for its failure to become Spotify than for innovating how we jam out. But it can always find solace in the fact that Apple Music will crush everything anyway .

73. TV Tropes (2004)

There’s probably a TV trope page describing the seemingly endless pit you can find yourself in after clicking on one of the site’s many, many reference pages for genre tropes across popular culture. TV Tropes’ user-generated archives of examples of everything from categories like the Loveable Rogue to Color Coded Wizardry are so ridiculously maintained, you can’t help but find yourself reading one, only to click on another, and another, another, and another. Hours will pass like minutes, but hey, at least you learned about the historical prevalence of diving kicks in pop culture.

72. Photobucket (2003)

Before Flickr ate its lunch, Photobucket made saving, sharing, and hosting photos on the web dead easy—and free. It was the pit stop before your pics hit MySpace, and later, the official host of the images you tweeted on Twitter. Who knows if all your old photos are still there, gathering dust or rotting away—imagine what a treasure trove you’d find if you could only remember your login.

71. XKCD (2005)

Created by American author Randall Munroe in 2005, xkcd is, as its tagline proclaims, a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Munroe’s subject matter belies the comic’s minimalist presentation, addressing nerdy and heady topics with humor , irreverence , and insight . And sometimes, xkcd is just plain silly . No doubt, this webcomic has become an indelible touchpoint for geek culture .

70. Hampsterdance (1998)

The animated, musical Hampsterdance website of 1998 was one of the internet’s first memes. It was a time when a certain purer kind of internet humor could survive: impossibly wholesome, addictively repetitive, and completely inscrutable. Di-da-dee da dee da doh-doh…

69. Wookieepedia (2005)

Wikis have become a vital part of internet fandom over the past 20 years, and in terms of depth or fame, perhaps none can rival the unofficial encyclopedia for all things Star Wars . Known for its fearsomely dedicated community of archivists that can update relevant pages with new material mere hours after its official release, no matter how obscure, it’s one of the most enthrallingly nerdy resources you can find. Where else are you going to learn about the history of iconic, memorable Star Wars characters like Carlist Rieekan and… that guy with an ice cream maker from Empire Strikes Back ?

68. W3Catalog (1993)

Some might quibble over whether W3Catalog counts as the first search engine, but it’s as good of a pick as any. In 1993, web enthusiasts maintained hand-curated lists of websites and W3Catalog mirrored and reformatted them while adding a search function. Pointing to content, making it look like your own, and ensuring that it’s searchable all became defining characteristics of our online mess, and we have this little project to thank.

67. GameFAQs (1995)

Famous for its message boards almost as much as for its countless user-made game guides, GameFAQs was one of the first petri dishes of internet culture. Many a meme and young troll were spawned from the crevices of its Life, Universe and Everything (LUE) social board, which first prompted heavy moderating and eventually a complete ban for newer members. Though GameFaqs still exists today, most people have seemingly moved on , even the trolls.

66. The Awl (2009)

Most days on The Awl began with a New York weather report unlike any other. Poetic musings on the color of the sky mixed with observations of workers scurrying through sleet or basking in glorious rays of sunshine. And that’s how the now-defunct bloggers’ blog approached everything. It zeroed in on small parts of life that aren’t given the importance they deserve, then it just let good writers do what they do best.

65. Hotmail (1996)

One of the first free email services to grace the internet, Microsoft’s Hotmail was training wheels for email. It eventually wilted in popularity as competitors like Yahoo and Google released their own versions. But that didn’t stop your parents from using their accounts for as long as humanly possible. The rest of us just foisted our spam mail onto it, at least until 2013, when the service was formally folded into Outlook.

64. AltaVista (1995)

If you grew up alongside the internet, chances are the words “Alta-Vista” are still rattling around in some dusty corner of your brain alongside Netscape Navigator and that sound a dial-up modem makes. Google may be the indomitable search engine of the 21st century, but it owes no small debt to Alta-Vista, which kind of invented the whole indexing-websites-for-targeted-searches thing. Alta-Vista lived on in the Yahoo! search engine until 2013, but it’ll endure forever in our 90s-nostalgic hearts.

63. LinkedIn (2002)

Try as it may to convince us it’s a social media platform, LinkedIn will probably never be anything more than an online resume service, to most users. Sure, you may get alerts and messages from spammers or people who take the platform way more seriously than you. And you may only check it when you’re looking for a job or snooping on someone—but it’s almost always at least a little bit useful, which is more than we can say about most things.

62. Open Secrets (1996)

We live in an era of wild corruption as capitalist vampires sink their teeth ever deeper into our political system. With its huge database of donors, politicians, PACs, and how they’re all connected, Open Secrets is the sunlight working to keep the ghouls away.

61. Pinterest (2010)

You’ve likely heard of Pinterest and its users mocked. This is in part because the vast majority of its users are women and reflexive skepticism of things that appeal to women is baked into our culture. Pinterest is a nice, pretty social media platform that can be helpful in planning events or finding visual inspiration. The site popularized image-focused social sharing, paving the way for Instagram’s dominance. It’s also a social media platform that doesn’t have a Nazi problem.

60. Seamless (2005)

Seamless is that one essential service for those lazy, rainy days when all you want to do is to tuck into an entire box of pizza and never leave your apartment again. This website survived the Dot Com implosion (back when it was called “Seamless Web”) to usher in a new era of app-based delivery services like Uber Eats—but at what cost? There are downsides to having a greasy bag of fries so easily whisked to your door at any possible moment.

59. Newgrounds (1995)

As a democratized launchpad for creative careers, few sites can rival the track record of Newgrounds. A staggering number of animators, video game creators, voice actors, and YouTubers are counted as site alumni. Unfortunately, as the web’s reliance on Flash dwindled, so did the vitality of the community.

58. Pitchfork (1995)

Launched in 1995 by Ryan Schreiber and owned by Condé Nast, Pitchfork gave rise to a new kind of music reviewing, one that elevated fringey and up-and-coming artists to a larger audience. Its reviewers have settled down in recent years, but the site was once known for its brutally scathing reviews . Love it or hate it, Pitchfork is hard to ignore .

57. WikiLeaks (2006)

Today, WikiLeaks is a shadow of its former self. Its founder’s legal troubles—including an unresolved investigation into allegations of rape—and an exodus of volunteers coupled with a series of questionable releases has left its name tarnished. But there was never a time that this publication didn’t piss people off. It pioneered a form of activism dedicated to radical transparency, and the ways in which we’ve seen political figures embrace it when it benefits them or condemn it when it doesn’t is a testament to the fact that it was onto something. Maybe it didn’t change journalism but, for better and worse, it changed the world.

56. Digg (2004)

Digg’s greatness is most evident not in how it succeeded but how it failed. “Digg version 4” remains one of the internet’s greatest blunders. Prior to this redesign, Digg was a go-to social news site, a place that had the power to make or break websites that had links appear on the wildly popular homepage. But Digg’s ranking system was broken, allowing a cadre of powerusers to game the site. Digg v4 was the final straw. Today, Digg is a mix of curated links, videos, and original articles—and honestly, it’s better that way.

55. Expedia (2001)

There are about 10 million ways to book flights, hotels, and rental cars on the internet—some of them with fancy spokespeople (SHATNER!!), others with truly innovative ways of finding you a fare that’s four bucks cheaper than anywhere else. But Expedia has been at it for more than 20 years, and at the risk of sounding like a goddamn shill, it represents much of what we expect from an online business in terms of reliability and usability. It works, and you don’t feel ripped off or dirty after you book your flight. The downside is that booking sites have created a “ race to the bottom ” in terms of pricing, causing airlines to find new ways to cram as many people in as they can. So blame Expedia for your five inches of leg room.

54. OkCupid (2004)

OKCupid’s inclusive, free, match-by-questionnaire service made online dating finally feel like something you could use without seeming desperate. And unlike Tinder or Grindr, OKCupid lets you vet potential suitors (and threesome requests) using more than just an image and a potentially creepy message. The company has had its share of blunders—remember when it gave attractive people special perks , or when it forced people to use their real names ?—but this is one example of an online service that has managed to evolve with the times.

53. Neopets (1999)

Fake pets weren’t exactly new when Neopets launched in 1999, but a combination of community, world-building, and a full-fledged economy set the virtual world apart. Sure, you could log-in to play games, go on quests for faeries, or see how long it takes for your Cybunny to starve, or you could learn how to code and navigate the stock market. The site was a welcoming home to a majority of women , some of whom went on to careers in tech and unlike most startups from the ‘90s, Neopets is still alive and well today.

52. Space Jam (1996)

Come on and slam, and welcome to the jam. The promotional website for Michael Jordan’s 1996 flick Space Jam is dripping with datedness— terrible backgrounds , mismatched font , and Shockwave games galore. Amazingly, it’s still up today, a time capsule of everything beautiful and terrible about ‘90s websites.

51. BuzzFeed (2006)

Hate BuzzFeed all you want—it’s an internet powerhouse for a reason. With its mix of devilishly specific listicles, addictive quizzes, and churn of engineered viral content, BuzzFeed set the tone for mainlining a stream of pure internet straight to your brain. The upside is, it used that successful strategy to build out an investigative news desk that has reporters in the White House and made “pee tape” a household phrase.

50. Dropbox (2007)

As user-friendly as our computers and devices have become, some things, like setting up a home network, simply aren’t tasks your parents are ever going to figure out. That was the beauty of Dropbox when it first arrived: It made sharing files between computers incredibly easy, without the need for clogging up email inboxes, or having to sneakernet a flash drive between machines. It now has countless competitors, but we haven’t found a reason to switch yet.

49. Weather (1996)

You used to have to wait until the “8s” if you wanted your local forecast from the Weather Channel. Weather.com changed that, marking the beginning of having your forecast right at your fingertips. Though you can get your weather with a side of puppies or profanity on your phone nowadays, Weather.com is the brawn behind many of those weather forecasts, the one thing that unites us in our increasingly fractured hellscape.

48. Vimeo (2004)

Vimeo started as a streamlined way for creators to share their films and videos. The site is still affordable and user-friendly but now bills itself as a one-stop hub for “all your video needs”: uploading and sharing works in ultra high quality; livestreaming; a stock-footage marketplace; and other tools and features. And if you just like to watch, there’s a huge, free, community-built library of films to choose from.

47. Giphy (2013)

In those moments when words fail you, a GIF can be the perfect way to get a point across. And Giphy’s done incredible work to make it infinitely faster and easier to find exactly the right GIF you want for any situation. More than that, though, Giphy’s focus on creating GIFs from content featuring women, people of color, and queer folks who oftentimes don’t get the chance to become immortalized by the internet is the kind of good-faith effort that benefits us all. Now it’s on you to stop using the same fucking GIFs as everyone else.

46. Blogger (1999)

Blogger, launched in 1999, helped pull society out of the primordial ooze of building custom HTML tables every time someone had a random thought they wanted to share with the world. Everyone thought they needed a website, but what they really needed was a blog. After a few years, this little experiment taught us most people don’t need either.

45. 4Chan (2003)

4Chan once defined countless meme formats and served as a hub during the golden age of well-intentioned hactivism. Simply put, it changed the language of the internet. And its commitment to anonymity, not data collection, has served as a chaotic counterbalance to the most powerful forces on the web. It’s also rightfully earned a bad rap for being a home to trolls, vicious racists, and all sorts of other degenerates. It’s led to Nazi uprisings, hoaxes, and harassment. It may have even given us President Donald Trump. Given all the things that have risen out of 4chan, it’s carved out its place as one of the most vile but consequential places on the internet.

44. Twitch (2011)

Twitch’s explosion has allowed gaming livestreams to evolve from a niche hobby to full-time careers. The communal aspect of Twitch forms a huge part of its appeal, whether it’s for watching zeitgeist games like Fortnite or Overwatch , or watching livestreamed marathons of Bob Ross with thousands of other people, to just watching people live their lives in the IRL channel. But anywhere on the web where minor celebrities collide with mobs of anonymous users, there’s bound to be some degree of harassment. It’s gotten to the point where swatting—calling a SWAT team on a streamer mid-livestream—has become more commonplace. It’s the 21st century version of TV, and it’s not yet done turning weird.

43. WebMD (1996)

Is this rash on my elbow going to kill me? Before the launch of WebMD in 1996, you’d have to visit a doctor to get a question like that answered. But thanks to WebMD, you can not only look up that rash, you can look up the dozens of other things that are all, somehow, definitely going to kill you.

42. GeoCities (1994)

For many ‘90s internet users, free website host GeoCities was their first experience with both coding and publishing online. The result was a chaotic mix of these GeoCitizens’ thoughts, obsessions, and favorite rotating skull gifs. The user-generated internet of today might be easier to use (and look at), but it feels positively sterile compared to the web’s original lost continent.

41. Chatroulette (2009)

Go to Chatroulette.com, and you’ll almost immediately be confronted with stranger’s dick, which is more or less where the website was when it launched nearly a decade ago to a flash of viral popularity. Its functionality is unbelievably simple. Log on, and it plunks you into a video chat with a random stranger. Don’t like what you see? Click next. And so on until you’ve had enough. The concept is harmless enough, but knowing what we do now about terrible people on the internet: Of course it blossomed into cesspool of surprise dicks instead of into a font of thoughtful conversation.

40. Homestar Runner (2000)

Homestar Runner is the quintessential Flash animation series. Launched in 2000, the cartoon website grew into an internet phenomenon, largely through word of mouth, with series like “Strong Bad Email” and the annual Halloween specials. Now that Flash (mostly) doesn’t work anymore, the website has switched to a YouTube channel , where Mike and Matt Chapman—better known as the Brothers Chaps—post the occasional new April Fools Day episode or other one-off specials .

39. Etsy (2005)

From glitter and yarn to metalwork and 3D printing, Etsy is an enormous hub for individuals to find homes for their creative wares. Whereas artists once had to rely on local craft fairs or small boutiques to make a living, the e-commerce site allowed them to reach the masses. And if you are dying to live large in the vintage lifestyle but your local flea markets just weren’t cutting it, Etsy always has what you’re looking for.

38. Hulu (2007)

It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary Hulu was when it launched in 2007. If you wanted to be a cordcutter and drop your cable company back in those days, you have extremely limited (and expensive) options for getting your TV shows next day. Hulu gave you a way to watch TV shows, all through the thing we used to call the magic of the internet.

37. Imgur (2009)

Imgur founder and CEO Alan Schaaf didn’t invent image hosting—but he did make it suck a whole lot less. Created specifically for sharing images on Reddit, Imgur made uploading and sharing photos and (later) GIFs clean and simple. And the Reddit community rewarded Schaaf by almost exclusively using Imgur for their posts on the site, allowing him to turn Imgur into a well-funded business and a social network in its own right. Of course, Reddit last year launched native image hosting, screwing Imgur over —but hey, this is the internet. Everything disappoints you eventually.

36. Megaupload (2005)

In the beginning, before Kim Dotcom was internationally known as a festering sentient potato that sometimes rolls off the couch to squeal stupid things on the internet, he was the proprietor of Megaupload, an online file-transfer and storage platform so effective at distributing pirated intellectual property that it was dramatically raided and shut down by the Department of Justice in 2012. The ensuing legal battle and subsequent collapse of Dotcom’s image are all distractions from one fact: Megaupload was a good-ass way to steal music.

35. DeviantArt (2000)

For 18 years, users have been allowed to submit virtually any artwork they want, and they’ve certainly taken advantage of the freedom. Yet somehow, pregnant Sonic the Hedgehogs, Kirk and Spock making out, airbrushed warlocks, and anime have all merged into an aesthetic that is instantly recognizable and can only be called by one name: DeviantArt.

34. Flickr (2004)

Before Facebook and Instagram, Flickr was the place to put your photos. You can still find snapshots from family gatherings, the White House, and NASA next to landscapes HDR’d to the max. And it remains a solid platform for amateur photographers. Flickr is a bit quieter nowadays, but it’s one of the few early sites that gives you little reason to hate yourself for using it.

33. SoundCloud (2008)

There was a brilliant period of time when SoundCloud gave aspiring young musicians and DJs an easy way to upload and share their music. Then, along came the copyright hawks, and Spotify, and the record companies, and other jerks who chipped away at SoundCloud’s glory. Now, SoundCloud is a great place to host your own podcast, not the remix mecca it used to be.

32. Urban Dictionary (1999)

As much as we all love it when traditional, “respectable” dictionaries decide to participate in cultural conversations via subtweet, there’s still a degree to which the institutions are playing catch-up in terms of cataloging contemporary words and idioms. By being crowdsourced, Urban Dictionary circumvents other dictionaries’ general slowness to change and keep pace with the times in a way that makes it an invaluable digital resource.

31. LiveJournal (1999)

A year after Open Diary and Xanga, LiveJournal became a go-to destination for confessional writing, paving the way for a decade of oversharing. Russian-owned since 2007, it remains popular mostly with Russian-speakers and is subject to some draconian-ass censorship laws.

30. MapQuest (1996)

Launched in 1996, MapQuest was the first mainstream mapping website that gave users directions. For the first time ever, people didn’t need to give you turn by turn directions on how to get from point A to point B—the computer did it. It still helped if you had a basic knowledge of maps, but MapQuest opened new doors (and gave drivers new confidence) in exploring the physical world.

29. Kickstarter (2009)

It’s hard to remember a time when Kickstarter wasn’t a nightmare filled with imaginary products that will most likely never see the light of day. But the crowdfunding site has also been responsible for a handful of success stories, including the Oculus Rift. At best, it connects inventors directly to consumers, letting them front the cost of developing a new knick-knack or gadget while also making them shoulder most of the risk. The site has had its share of spectacular failures and scams as a result, but we keep going back for the potential it has to help realize a truly innovative product.

28. eBaums World (2001)

In the early 2000s, eBaums was the meme site before the word “memes” creeped its way into everyday life. A mainstay of early web culture, it gave us all the weird, creepy content to troll your younger siblings with as you stayed up until 3am browsing through to find the best of the worst. Now that the internet has grown up a little, it’s clear that it’s mostly just the worst.

27. Google Earth (2001)

For the 99.999 percent of adults who never realized their childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, Google’s in-browser virtual globe app may be the next best thing. A one-stop shop for the best satellite snaps of our dizzyingly beautiful planet from mountain glaciers to rainforests, Google Earth has only gotten better over the years as the technology used to image our planet improves. It’s also hands-down the most accurate tool for measuring your distance to the nearest Waffle House, if you’re into that sort of thing.

26. Yahoo (1994)

The era of Yahoo’s dominance was a more innocent time. What was once a massively popular and seemingly innocuous email hosting service, search engine, and news site would soon be known for its litany of screwups, including one of the largest (and most poorly handled) data breaches of all time—a breathtakingly spectacular failure to witness. But hey, at least it’s not, uh, fueling genocide ?

25. GitHub (2008)

Thanks to Github, professional and amateur developers work together to make projects that wouldn’t be possible on their own. More than anything, it’s a driver of work on open-source software and a great place to gank code that others were kind enough to slave over for free.

24. Rotten Tomatoes (1998)

Whether you want it to or not, Rotten Tomatoes has become a huge part of not just film criticism but film fandom. It’s grown hugely from its humble beginnings 20 years ago, and now its aggregate of film and review scores, the tomatometer, has become not only a make-or-break marketing metric for studios, but even the absurd battleground for internet fandom wars, from Batman v Superman to Star Wars: The Last Jedi .

23. Know Your Meme (2008)

Running on Wiki software, KnowYourMeme’s editors and research community document viral internet lore—memes’ beginnings, movements, transformations, and public reactions. Launched in 2008, the site quickly outgrew its video series predecessor and has since survived a messy acquisition. Now, as weaponized memes have permanently bled into our daily lives, KYM isn’t just a resource for people who want to know what the fuck everyone’s talking about, but a living historical document of a stranger-than-fiction time.

22. NASA (1993)

NASA has long been a core liaison between humans and space. Scientists use its observing tools to make fantastic discoveries and create mind-blowing images that awe the public. NASA’s website serves as its mouthpiece—nearly every piece of space-related news you’ve read started with a picture, some text, and a few quotes from a NASA webpage.

21. Gawker (2002)

Gawker was a good website.*

20. The WWW Project (1991)

Tim Berners-Lee defined the way we interact with one another over the internet when he created the first web browser and website of the World Wide Web in the late-‘80s and early ‘90s. The internet had long been under development as a communication tool, but the WorldWideWeb defined how we’d use it. The internet’s complexity may have grown to bewildering levels, but ultimately, we use it the same way that Berners-Lee envisioned it: a web of HTML documents defined by their URLs connected through links.

19. Facebook (2004)

Few people could have predicted that the college directory Mark Zuckerberg started in his dorm room would grow into an international behemoth of a corporation with the power to upend the basic functioning of democracy around the world. Many would have guessed that Facebook would become a magnificent ad engine that would slurp up as much data about its users as possible and use that information in mysterious ways. Yet, here we are.

18. AOL (1993)

After the screeching sound of a dialup connection, the first thing many of us heard on the internet was “welcome, you’ve got mail.” If the dial-up hiss was the sound of getting online, “you’ve got mail” was the sound of what it meant to be online: a human connection through the static and noise.

17. Amazon (1994)

Any semi-competent person could’ve launched a successful e-commerce business in the mid-90's, but only Jeff Bezos had the foresight, acumen, greed, and ruthlessness to make something like Amazon. It began as a simple online bookstore, but two innovations made it into the retail juggernaut it is today: 1-click ordering, which it patented in 1999, and free two-day shipping, which it introduced in 2005. Perhaps more than any other website, Amazon is responsible for the era of unmitigated convenience—an era defined by shitty labor practices and strong-arm tactics .

16. The Pirate Bay (2003)

The same way Napster helped fuel the popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing by making it easy to find MP3s and enrage the Recording Industry Association of America, The Pirate Bay made downloading everything else, including movies, more accessible with a giant directory of available torrents (most of which were, let’s be honest, probably illegal). But while the RIAA was able to nuke Napster and similar apps, in almost 15 years the Motion Picture Association of America has yet to been able to wipe The Pirate Bay completely off the internet. Its resilience has been its best feature, and while it’s no longer the site of choice for torrenters, it helped popularize those tools as being the best way to download the latest, uh, Linux builds. Yeah, Linux builds.

15. Tumblr (2007)

This microblogging/social network hybrid was born in 2007 and has since grown into a phenomenon 400+ million-Tumblrs strong. It still maintains thriving communities and serves as the foundation for many marginalized creators’ careers, especially those who get their start in fanart and move to comics or animation. While many teens have moved to Instagram, Tumblr has carved out a place on the internet for fandoms of all kinds. And for those who don’t fit in on Snapchat and Instagram, Tumblr is still the go-to place for community, especially for queer teens.

14. IMDB (1993)

What started as a series of lists in an old Usenet group quickly evolved into what became the go-to stop for anyone looking to find out who “that guy from that thing” was. While entertainment production information may not be high on many people’s lists of important information, the Internet Movie Database is a vital instrument in keeping track of television, movie, and video game history.

13. PornHub (2007)

People born after the early aughts will never really know what it’s like to have to really work to get their hands on pornography—to search for discarded Playboys in the woods behind their houses or steal issues of Men’s Fitness for, you know, workout tips. While PornHub has had an undeniably devastating impact on the porn industry, it also can’t be overstated how much of an impact it’s had on our culture and the ways we talk about and consume porn.

12. Craigslist (1995)

Aesthetically, it’s never been much to look at, but Craigslist is a living fossil of the internet that should have been—a shockingly profitable anomaly among the ad-supported megaplatforms and data-mining operations disguised as services. Unfortunately, the rise of this classifieds site came alongside the decline of newspapers and alt-weeklies, and we’re still debating how much Craigslist is responsible for the downfall of journalism. Regardless, Craigslist has retained its usefulness to countless people for over two decades, and of the many people to become fantastically wealthy in the technology sector, founder Craig Newmark is among the most famously charitable.

11. Snopes (1994)

The internet has made it possible for urban legends, bullshit rumors, and obvious hoaxes to go viral almost instantly. Enter Snopes, which has been around since 1994 and has long since become an invaluable, trustworthy source for fact-checking, debunking, and shutting down hysterical comment threads on Facebook.

10. MySpace (2003)

This is perhaps one of the few wildly popular social networks that didn’t derail into total chaos and destruction. It taught many how to code thanks to its customization options, and it taught even more how to be petty . But if MySpace really taught us anything, it’s that not all great things should last forever.

9. eBay (1995)

Plagued by scams over the years, the site was once famously propped up by the reselling of Beanie Babies, and it helped support PayPal, an money service that would try to be the internet’s bank without all the regulation. But eBay has endured scandals, bad press, and unsavory affiliations because it continues to be really, really good at one thing: helping you buy obscure shit on the internet.

8. Reddit (2005)

It’s safe to assume a site that calls itself “the front page of the internet” is full of shit. But Reddit is, like it or not, the closest thing you can get. Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown from a link-sharing and commenting site primarily for the programmer crowd into a baffling hive of every possible online community you can imagine—with all the LOLs, Awwws, and scumbaggery that come with it. Despite the cesspool of bad opinions, stale memes, misogynists, and PM’d dick pics, there’s a good reason over 230 million people voluntarily visit Reddit every month. (Porn, the reason is probably porn.)

7. Netflix (1997)

First its flimsy red mailers freed us from schlepping on Friday nights to the neighborhood Blockbuster. Then the streaming service practically killed the cable box, so thoroughly transforming TV viewers into binge-watchers that “Netflix and chill” became a half-hearted euphemism for sex. Its streaming catalog may seem dingy now—but hell, at least we got a few good “Netflix Originals” out of it.

6. Twitter (2006)

If you utter the phrase “hell site,” odds are someone will know you’re talking about Twitter. For many, especially non-white-dudes, it’s a haven only if you’re looking for harassment and despair. But where else can you get news the second it happens, personally yell at Elon Musk, and watch our republic die in real time? Where else would something as sublime as Horse_Ebooks take root? Anyone who says they remember when Twitter was good is lying. But the content scrolls on, and we can’t look away.

5. Internet Archive (1996)

The website of websites. The Internet Archive not only saves politicians’ most embarrassing moments for our future reference through its Wayback Machine, it also curates thousands of forgotten gems for us to rediscover. A trip to the archive’s homepage is the perfect way to get out of an internet rut and remind yourself why this whole thing is special.

4. The Onion (1996)

Comedy, especially the kind of throwaway gags the internet traffics in, doesn’t always age well. But two decades after launching its satirical news site, The Onion remains the web’s chief authority on the absurdity of our world and the media that covers it. As a Univision property, it’s true that The Onion now shares a parent company with Gizmodo, but only a supreme asshole could deny the caustic brilliance of headlines like: “‘ No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens .”

3. YouTube (2005)

If you ever tried to find a video of your favorite band or bloopers from your favorite show on the web before YouTube, then you understand just how important the site has been to make video content available to anyone with internet. The YouTube of 2018 isn’t just about making video more accessible; it’s created cottage industries around influencers, given voices to those who’d lacked it—sometimes with disastrous results—and concocted a whole new way to push us over the edge .

2. Google (1998)

View the 1998 version of virtually any website, and you’ll likely be horrified by a logic-defying layout and equally hideous graphics. But Google.com has remained relatively unchanged since its first iteration, and its simple search bar is still the easiest way to navigate the internet. Google’s PageRank algorithm took much of the chaos out of online search, and its ever-improving AI means you can search for “moive shotims near me” and still find exactly what you’re looking for. Unfortunately, mastering search was the first step in Google’s path toward internet domination that, over the past two decades, has seeped into virtually every nook and cranny of our lives.

1. Wikipedia (2001)

There’s no other major website that has fulfilled its promise and stuck to its original ideals the way that Wikipedia has. The Gizmodo staff is based in North America, and our choices on this list reflect our own little bubble, but there’s no denying that Wikipedia has had a global effect. Collecting millions of articles in hundreds of languages about all manner of topics is a baffling accomplishment. The fact that this gargantuan encyclopedia has been pulled together through mass cooperation, compromise, and collective generosity is nothing short of a miracle.

Wikipedia has refined its system of volunteer editors and citation requirements since it first came online in 2001, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It’s a self-correcting organism that’s sometimes prone to bullshit and vandalism, but it mostly seems to find a way to steer itself back toward something close to right and true. And all of this time, it’s managed to do this without advertising or becoming evil.

We live in a moment when few people seem to agree on a shared reality. Wikipedia has been diligently working away at creating some kind of record that can stand as an acceptable version of the truth. And when it gets it wrong, there’s always a chance to make an edit.

* Disclosure: Gizmodo was previously owned by Gawker Media, former parent company of Gawker (RIP).

The 15 Most Influential Websites of All Time

T he web, or “world wide web” as we used to say, turns 27 years old on December 20. On that date, nearly three decades ago, British engineer and scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website , running on a NeXT computer at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland.

The website wasn’t much at the time, just a few sentences organized into topic areas that laid out the arguments for the concept. But it established vital first principles still essential to the web as it exists today: the notion of hyperlinks that reimagined documents (and eventually any form of media) as nonlinear texts, and the ability for anyone, anywhere in the world, to peruse that content by way of a browser: a piece of software that cohered to universal formatting standards.

It’s been a wild ride since. In the mid-1990s VRML (or as it was then known, Virtual Reality Markup Language) seemed on the verge of transforming the web. Adobe’s Shockwave and Flash media players were at one point multimedia stars in the ascendant. Who could have known in those early days, that by 2017, a landscape once loomed over by companies like Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Netscape (Navigator) would fractionalize and give way to totally new players like Google (Chrome)?

Here’s TIME’s collection of the 15 websites that most influenced the medium, and why.

15. Match.com

Emerging generations may someday look back at the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a kind of dividing line: before and after the Internet, and before and after we scrutinized potential dates with a service like Match.com. The latter’s been around since 1995, an online dating service whose inception in 1993 was originally to distribute online classified ads for newspapers. But that quickly shifted to helping people make screened and interests-matched interpersonal connections, culminating in a service that today operates in 25 countries and boasts tens of millions of members.

Online forums have been around since the Internet’s inception, so in that sense, Reddit’s just the modern face of what began as dial-up discussion boards. But Reddit, which arrived in 2005, also folds in social news curation, making it a combination story-and-reaction hub. That notion of melding interesting, obscure or hot button topics with fan communities has proven so popular that it’s lured hundreds of millions of users who generate tens of billions of page views annually, giving rise to a site slogan that plausibly reads “The front page of the internet.”

13. Pandora

Early Internet sites like MP3.com kicked off a music-sharing wave that’s culminated in digital platforms like iTunes and Spotify, but Pandora exemplifies the notion of online streamed tunes with recommendations delivered to taste. Launched in 2000, Pandora let users play songs they knew or from genre categories in a browser, then followed with suggested songs based on shared traits. Users could give each selection a thumbs up or down, “training” the service to cater to their preferences. You can see elements of that process in everything from Amazon’s “New For You” product recommendations, to Apple’s “For You” iTunes content curation tab.

12. WikiLeaks

A site once contrasted with The Pentagon Papers for its subversive “document dumps” of classified information has in the wake of the 2016 election become a battleground for debate about the role of mass scale whistleblowing and propaganda. Established in 2006 by Australian activist Julian Assange as a means to anonymously divulge sensitive information about countries and institutions, Wikileaks was best known for its revelations about U.S. military operations, diplomatic activities, detention camps and abetting of NSA leaker Edward Snowden — until 2016, when the site involved itself in the U.S. presidential election by releasing troves of Democratic party emails allegedly supplied by Russian operatives.

11. The Pirate Bay

Open platforms invite controversy by their nature, giving voice to groups who want to challenge cultural or legal principles. Sites like Napster kickstarted illicit music-sharing in the early 2000s, but The Pirate Bay, launched by a trio of Swedes in 2003, exemplifies the anti-copyright argument that “information wants to be free.” The site indexes content hosted by others, providing links that its users can use to download movies, music, books and more — often in flagrant violation of information-sharing laws. Though hounded across the globe by lawsuits, domain seizures and criminal investigations, the site somehow persists and remains a flashpoint for debate over the virtues and perils of peer-to-peer file sharing.

10. Info.cern.ch

Created by “father of the web” Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN research center in Switzerland, info.cern.ch isn’t much to look at today. But the archetype for anything is influential by default, and that’s certainly true of this, the spark for every website that followed. Still viewable today, the site spotlights features in the DNA of every modern website, including hyperlinks, a site map, an About-style page and contact information. We’ve made order of magnitude changes to the audiovisual aspects of web design since, but Berners-Lee’s basic thoughts on what a website should be still resonate nearly 30 years later.

Amazon may run the world’s biggest online store today, but credit eBay for popularizing the idea of an open marketplace for buyers and sellers. eBay, which began life in 1995 as AuctionWeb, forever altered the way the world passed along and monetized used goods. And it paved the way for modern e-tailers like Etsy, which lets anyone sell their crafts or run a small business online. Amazon may be where we turn for paper towels, groceries and last minute holiday gifts, but it’s still eBay people scan to find vintage or scarce items, from rare pairs of sneakers to sold out iPhones.

8. Drudge Report

Matt Drudge’s eponymous “Report” is most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, but the site rarely posts news of its own. Instead, it serves as a conservative-leaning news aggregator, pointing to articles from across the web and putting an ideologically-spun (and irresistibly clicky) headline on them. Drudge’s barebones web design has changed little over the years, serving as a sort of living memorial to the days of dial-up Internet. But the site remains massively influential (and massively read) in Washington, D.C., influencing the agenda of Beltway movers and shakers.

Years before “Google” became a verb, there was Yahoo. An early effort to bring order to the chaos of the Internet, Yahoo served as a sort of Yellow Pages for the web, with human editors selecting links to news stories and other sites. Google’s relevance-based search algorithms eventually resonated more strongly with users, plunging Yahoo toward irrelevance as its raison d’être dwindled. But Yahoo’s core idea — that something should help Internet users cut through all the noise to find a bit of signal — remains an essential tenet of online information curation.

6. Craigslist

Long before finding a date by swiping your smartphone, browsing apartments on Trulia, or searching for part-time work through Indeed, there was Craigslist. The site remains a popular destination for real estate and job listings in 2017, with more than 60 million monthly U.S. users . Craigslist started as an emailed list of San Francisco-based events in 1995, which founder Craig Newmark expanded into a classified ads site and online forum. Its influences extend beyond the web, too: many attribute a significant part of the newspaper industry’s decline to the shift from print ads to online ones.

In retrospect, watching videos on the Internet seems obvious — monitors are basically tiny flatscreen TVs, after all. But it took YouTube to show the world that anyone could be a video star. Just as early blogging platforms made everyone a critic, YouTube (followed by Instagram and Snapchat) turned anyone with a smartphone into a video publisher. The impact has been immeasurable, both for better and worse: YouTube makes it easy to entertain ourselves, learn new skills or keep in touch with far-flung friends. But it can also be a haven for invective and hate speech, a problem the Alphabet-owned site continues to grapple with.

4. Facebook

A website founded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the early 2000s as a way to profile Harvard classmates has become the world’s largest social network. More than two billion users frequent the platform monthly, eclipsing alternate platforms like Tencent’s WeChat (968 million), Instagram (700 million) and Twitter (328 million). But the site has also evolved from a way to stay in touch with friends and relatives, to a medium through which both news and propaganda flow freely , mingling in ways that often make it difficult to tell one from the other. Facebook has pledged to do battle with so-called “fake news,” and says it’s refining the site’s processes to mitigate the spread of misinformation as well as clickbait .

3. Wikipedia

While your high school teachers and college professors may have taught you to doubt Wikipedia’s reliability, its rise to prominence since launching in 2001 is undeniable. With five million English entries, Wikipedia has become the de facto Internet encyclopedia. That said, Wikipedia’s openness — arguably what’s fueled its omnipresence — is also its biggest handicap. Since Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet access, the platform is susceptible to bias or outright inaccuracy. But that hasn’t hindered its popularity: according to Amazon’s analytics site Alexa, it’s the fifth most trafficked website globally.

Amazon in 2017 is a retail and technology behemoth, selling everything from salad dressing to server space. But it began as a humble online bookseller, paving the way for all the e-commerce sites that followed. The company may not have pioneered concepts like browsing a digital “store” or filling up an online “shopping cart,” but the site helped e-tail break into the mainstream, and at a time when many consumers weren’t comfortable plugging credit card numbers into browsers. Amazon accounts for just 5% of U.S. retail sales today, but its market share is expected to surge as traditional players’ revenue dwindles.

Since its arrival in 1998, Google has become so ingrained in our vernacular that Merriam Webster added it to the dictionary as a transitive verb. The multinational tech firm has become synonymous with the notion of researching anything — you don’t “look something up online,” you “Google” it. And it remains the web’s most pervasive search tool, accounting for 97% of the mobile search engine market and 79% of desktop search engine use, according to recent data from Net Market Share .

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Write to Matt Peckham at [email protected]

The World Wide Web turns 30: our favorite memories from A to Z

By Verge Staff

Illustrations by Alex Castro

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On this day 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal with the dreary title “Information Management” to his superior at the European physics laboratory CERN.

It began by asking how future scientists would keep track of their increasingly large projects. “This proposal provides an answer to such questions,” he wrote.

The proposal described what, in just a couple years’ time, would transform into the World Wide Web: a connected system for sharing information that would revolutionize how the entire planet communicated.

At the time, connected networks of computers had been up, running, and growing for a couple of decades. People had sent emails, shared files, ran message boards, and even created the first emoticons.

But it wasn’t until the World Wide Web came along that the internet at large really began to take off. Web browsers, webpages, and hyperlinks made information easy to find and move between, and because the core code was open sourced, anyone could create a browser or website of their own.

Over the past 30 years, major portions of the web have come and gone. They’ve made us laugh and cringe, let us waste time and find friends, and reshaped the world in the process.

For its anniversary, we’re looking back at some of our favorite websites, from A to Z, as well as some key people and technologies. Of course, there was far too much good stuff to include, so we had to note some additional favorites along the way.

The web quickly became a major place to shop, and nothing encompassed that better than Amazon. What began as an online bookstore rapidly expanded, and soon consumed, many of the brick-and-mortar brands we knew and loved. These days, using Amazon is kind of unavoidable: it’s a voice assistant, it’s the cloud powering many of the sites you use, it’s a gourmet grocery store chain, and it’s the site you use to buy pretty much anything. Ironically, it’s also learned from old rivals and opened plenty of physical stores.

Other favorites: Angelfire , America Online installation discs

From cat GIFs to personality quizzes to “The Dress,” BuzzFeed was one of the defining voices of early digital media, and it was good at what it set out to do: make viral content. Its irreverent voice set off a wave of copycat sites, enough to create an entire industry of online media for millennials begging to be parodied. Sure enough, it was. The Onion launched its satire website ClickHole , a pitch-perfect, bizarro version of clickbait sites, and in BoJack Horseman , Diane works at a BuzzFeed -like website called “Girl Croosh.”

Other favorites: Badgers , Blogger

Cascading Style Sheets made it easier to make pretty and usable webpages by separating out how a page looked from how a page was put together in HTML. More importantly, CSS made it easier to learn how to make pretty and usable webpages: you could use a browser to inspect a site’s code and start messing around with the whole page, changing everything with just a little tweak. (Shout-out to Microsoft for supporting CSS early. Then shout at Microsoft for ruining the lives of web coders everywhere with its weird box model and other broken CSS implementations.) Having to code to specific browsers is still a thing, but at least it’s not as bad as it once was. Go ahead and change a font on your favorite webpage today, just because you can.

Other favorites: Craigslist , cat videos

Computers birthed the World Wide Web, and the World Wide Web birthed Twitter, which so graciously provided us with the wonders of Weird Twitter. Dril, who fathered classics like, “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob” has played an important role in defining what it means to be Online. Last year, they published their best tweets by way of a seminal, self-titled book . And just like dril, we all will continue to ignore the advice of our loved ones and refuse to Log Off. Forever.

Other favorites: Digg , DeviantArt

Sitting somewhere between the professional storefront of Amazon and the complete free-for-all of Craigslist, eBay has cemented itself as the go-to place for buying pretty much anything second-hand online. Few online marketplaces are just as likely to sell you aftermarket car parts as they are second-hand clothes, and yet, somehow, eBay finds a place for all of them, and there are enough users (and now businesses) that you’ve actually got a pretty good chance of finding the obscure item that you need. These days, eBay’s dated interface often creaks under the weight of catering to absolutely everyone, but its catalog is just as weird and wonderful as it ever was.

Other favorites: eBaum’s World , Etsy

It was 2004: we had digital cameras and proto-social media sites like Myspace and Friendster, but there was no real way to share photos. Then Flickr came around and changed everything. It was an amazing feeling to upload a huge batch of pics from a backpacking trip, share them with friends, then relive the experience of waking up in tents pitched in the shadow of a glacier with the click of a button. You could do it through Flickr’s clean, attractive interface and without all of the clutter and noise that was typical of early aughts websites. Flickr was a digital gallery, an online photography museum for pros and amateurs alike. It seems to be shrinking these days, but it will always loom large in influence.

Other favorites: Fark , Flash games

Close your eyes, and imagine your dream GeoCities page. Maybe it has some glittering clip art or a tiled background because you couldn’t find an image big enough to fill up the screen without making it all stretchy and weird. While you’re deciding, though, maybe put up a GIF of a construction worker with a hard hat and an “under construction” sign so that visitors will know you have something good coming. Don’t forget to join a webring when you’re done.

Other favorites: Google Reader , GIFs

The web didn’t invent email, which predated it by at least 20 years. Webmail did, however, make email easy to use and widely accessible. Hotmail launched in 1996 as one of the first webmail sites that anyone could sign up to use as an alternative to their ISP’s offering. The early web was so geeky that Hotmail’s founders — Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith — chose the name because it included reference to HTML (“HoTMaiL”). Hotmail use exploded after it was purchased by Microsoft in 1997.

Other favorites: HTML , hashtags

Internet Archive

It’d take longer than a lifetime to consume a sizable fraction of the Internet Archive’s 20 million books, 4.9 million movies, 5.1 million audio recordings, and 410,000 pieces of software, including loads of classic games, all of which are available for free. But they all pale in comparison to the most important thing the Internet Archive is archiving: the internet itself. There’s no better place to see what the web was like — and expose things long thought forgotten — than the 349 billion webpages stored in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (You can thank it for most of the screenshots found on this page.)

Other favorites: Image macros

Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting every moment spent in her college dorm, by way of grainy photos uploaded every 15 minutes, in 1996. She was one of the first people to share her life online without a filter, offering a sense of intimacy and relatability that we now take for granted with digital celebrities. She was also one of the first people to discover the pitfalls of internet fame, including burnout after living years of her life in public, which is why she’s stayed mostly offline since 2003 when Jennicam went dark.

Other favorites: JSTOR , Java on the Brain

Know Your Meme

The internet is a never-ending sprawl of extremely good memes, constantly mutating, remixing, and changing. Know Your Meme chronicles and makes order out of that chaos.

Other favorites: kottke.org

LiveJournal

Once upon a time (around the turn of the 21st century), there was a social network called LiveJournal where large numbers of people (some with very confusing pseudonyms) hung out, blogged, argued in long comment threads, posted fiction and poetry and art, and had a generally good time. In 2007, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian media company, and many of its original contributors eventually decamped to Facebook, Twitter, and other foreign climes. LiveJournal is still, well, live; its servers (and its user agreement) are now Russian and so are many of its users.

Other favorites: Last.fm , Liquid Swords tweet

My Immortal

The web’s accessibility birthed a fan fiction renaissance, which inevitably generated a lot of angsty and self-indulgent fantasies from teenagers and, in turn, deliberately awful parodies of those fantasies. The fascinating thing about My Immortal is that  nobody’s sure which one it was.  Did a teen named Tara Gilesbie write a malapropism-filled Harry Potter fan story about a mall goth vampire witch named “Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way?” Was Tara herself a fictional creation? Or was My Immortal an earnest project that descended into trolling? A supposed “real” author came forward in 2017 with a memoir, but the publisher discovered she’d made up large parts of the story — only adding more layers to the mystery.

Other favorites: MapQuest , Movable Type

Destroying the menace that was Blockbuster’s late fees would have been legendary enough, but Netflix also managed to rapidly transform from a DVD rental service to a full-on digital streaming service that thoroughly redefined how and where we watch movies and TV. Netflix is now enmeshed in popular culture. The phrase “Netflix and chill” has become a meme, and it’s now a safe bet that you can strike up a conversation with an acquaintance around the latest original shows to run on the service. In 2019, streaming services are in, and Netflix is on top.

Other favorites: Newgrounds , Neopets

As online dating moved toward the mainstream, OkCupid eased us in with an endless stream of goofy (and very important) quizzes. The site’s compatibility measures have since fallen out of style in favor of simple swiping, but there was always something about OkCupid’s quirky approach that made the site and its users feel like they were in on some sort of joke about the inherent awkwardness of getting to know a stranger.

Other favorites: Oh Joy Sex Toy , The Onion

How would society have ever evolved without Pornhub? We’d probably be diving through dumpsters in search of discarded porno mags like horny little pizza rats, desperate to hole away our booty against the glare of onlookers. Yes, there are cultural downsides to so much porn being freely available. But Pornhub has also encouraged people to let their freak flags fly. It, and sites like it, have helped many find kinship around their quirky fetishes ever since the site launched in 2007 with a “Niches” section. What started as a place to view dirty pics is now one of the web’s most visited sites.

Other favorites: PostSecret , The Pirate Bay

The facts are these: QWOP is a game; it was created by the moral philosopher, game designer, and former Cut Copy bassist Bennett Foddy 11 years ago; and it is devilishly difficult. The game isn’t about winning or losing. It’s more a meditation on reward, punishment, and how much you’re willing to endure. QWOP may not have been the most fun Flash game, but it was one of the few that allowed you to truly feel something beyond the mash of a button.

Other favorites: Quora , quizzes

Digg came first, but it was Reddit that managed to create a user-curated news site around vibrant communities interested in everything from cat pictures to finance advice to beauty products. The self-described “front page of the internet” is also the place people go to unwind, discover curiosities, and find like minds. That’s been problematic at times, and Reddit is still dealing with the repercussions, but the site has become a fixture, and there’s nothing else quite like it.

Other favorites: RSS , Rickroll

The beauty of Strong Bad is that you don’t need to know a thing. The humor is self-explanatory: a cartoon antihero in a Lucha Libre mask sardonically answers his fan mail in the lowest-fi text interface imaginable. But in the early 2000s, it was anything but low-tech. The animated Flash web cartoons leaped from the screen in a way very few things on the web could. The Strong Bad Email series was popular at a time when the web was small enough that it sprouted memes of its own — including “Trogdor the Burninator,” an instant death metal classic that eventually made its way into Guitar Hero II .

Other favorites: StumbleUpon , spacejam.com

Tim Berners-Lee

When Tim Berners-Lee came up with what he thought would be a global system for knowledge and data sharing among research institutions three decades ago, it wasn’t called the World Wide Web; it was just “Mesh.” The WWW project was ambitious and exciting from the start, yes, but even its inventor could hardly have envisioned the subsequent explosion of the web’s use for private and commercial purposes.

Tim Berners-Lee continues to play a role in steering the development of the web via the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets universal standards like HTML5, and the World Wide Web Foundation, which advocates for a free and open web. As a supporter of net neutrality, Berners-Lee can most often be seen leveraging his celebrity to push governments and international organizations to preserve the web’s original collaborative spirit.

Other favorites: Tumblr , Trojan Room Coffee Pot

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the unglamorous string of code upon which this entire web edifice is built. A thing doesn’t exist on the web without an address string to identify its location. Like most things related to the web, the URL was never designed for the eventual ubiquity it achieved. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that there wasn’t any technical need for the double slash at the front of each URL, and he’d get rid of it if he could go back in time.

Other favorites: Urban Dictionary

vBulletin wasn’t the first or the only software to run web forums, but it was a favorite. Even in the age of Facebook, forums are still an essential strata of the web. They’re places where topic-specific communities gather to talk, argue, and (unfortunately) plot. vBulletin made it easier to create, manage, and moderate those communities. One devious setting called “Tachy Goes to Coventry” put a user on a global ignore list without alerting them that nobody was seeing what they were typing. It’s an effective moderation technique because sometimes it was easier to let somebody shout into a void than to tell them to shut up.

Other favorites: Vine , vlogs

You could just call Wikipedia “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but that’s underselling its impact. Wikipedia is a living reflection of modern culture. Since launching in 2001, it’s gone from shorthand for “don’t trust the internet” (kids, don’t cite Wikipedia in your homework!) to an arbiter of truth (kids, check Wikipedia before deciding the Moon landing was a hoax!). Its hypertext structure encourages intellectual curiosity — maybe a little too much, actually. (We’d link to Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page, but you’ve got three more entries to read, and we don’t want you to spend the next hour clicking links.)

Other favorites: WordPress , Web 2.0

XKCD has only been around since 2006, but it’s hard to imagine that there was ever an internet without it. It’s self-described as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” which covers a whole breadth of topics and lends itself to the classic adage of “there’s a relevant XKCD for everything.” Faceless stick figures make it easy to project ourselves in the comics, whether they’re single panels or behemoth undertakings that take you through a click-and-drag adventure . 

Other favorites: Xanga , XML

Search engines built the web, and Yahoo was one of the first, biggest, and longest to survive. Yahoo became the web’s homepage for many, delivering news, markets, sports, and more, and putting a link to your Yahoo mailbox on the same page. Yahoo’s homepage remains one of the most visited sites on the web, even as its influence has waned. The company was acquired by Verizon two years ago, and it’s infamous for letting Flickr waste away. (It certainly could have done better by Tumblr, too.)

Other favorites: YTMND , YouTube

Welcome to ZomboCom .

This is ZomboCom. Welcome. This is ZomboCom. Welcome to ZomboCom. You can do anything at ZomboCom. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. Welcome to ZomboCom.

Welcome to ZomboCom. This is ZomboCom. Welcome to ZomboCom! This is ZomboCom, welcome! Yes. This is ZomboCom.

Contributors: Dieter Bohn, Chaim Gartenberg, Andrew J. Hawkins, Sean Hollister, Jacob Kastrenakes, Makena Kelly, Barbara Krasnoff, Dami Lee, Shannon Liao, Jon Porter, Thomas Ricker, Adi Robertson, Vlad Savov, and TC Sottek

Google confirms the leaked search documents are real, google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation, electric bikes are about to get more expensive, and the timing couldn’t be worse, former openai board member explains why they fired sam altman, discord’s turning the focus back to games with a new redesign.

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How to View Your Browsing History

Easily find websites that you previously visited.

by Linda Criddle, Nancy Muir, Using the Internet Safely for Seniors for Dummies, March 28, 2011

Sometimes you need to find a site you visited but didn’t save as a favorite. To do that, you can review your browsing history.

• Click the Favorites Center button and then click History to display the History pane.
• Click the down arrow on the History button and select a sort method: By Date: Sort favorites by date visited. By Site: Sort alphabetically by site name. By Most Visited: Sort with the sites visited most on top and those visited least at the bottom of the list. By Order Visited Today: Sort by the order in which you visited sites today.
• In the History pane, click the link to the site you want to visit. It takes you to the site, and the History pane closes.

Graphic by Paul Moser

Here's how to start sorting your browser history.

In the History pane, click the link to the site you want to visit .

• You can also choose the arrow to the right of the Address bar to display sites you've visited most recently.
• You can search your Favorites, as well. With the Favorites Center open, click the arrow on the History button and choose Search History to display a search box you can use to search for sites you've visited.
• You can empty your History file so that no one can see the sites you've visited. (Kids do this a lot to hide searches from their parents or grandparents, but their monitoring software will flag this.) Perhaps you don't want your spouse or partner to know that you've been researching presents for an upcoming birthday, or maybe you're using a public computer and don't want to leave a trail. Whatever your motivation, to erase your history, choose Tools@@-->Internet Options. On the General tab of the Internet Options dialog box, click the Delete button under Browsing History.

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A Look Back At The Very First Website Ever Launched, 30 Years Later

Josie Fischels

This picture taken on April 30, 2013 in Geneva shows a 1992 copy of the world's first web page. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This picture taken on April 30, 2013 in Geneva shows a 1992 copy of the world's first web page.

On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world.

And while perhaps not as exciting or immersive as some of the nearly 1.9 billion websites that exist today, it makes sense that the first web page launched on the good ol' W3 was, well, instructions about how to use it.

The first website contained information about the World Wide Web Project. It launched at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, where it was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. On it, people could find out how to create web pages and learn about hypertext (coded words or phrases that link to content).

Berners-Lee created the web for the same reason a lot of us visit websites today: to make life just a little bit easier. For him, the problem to be solved rested in computers themselves: there was no way to share information between different devices.

The Father Of The Web Is Selling The Source Code As An NFT

And so in 1989, Berners-Lee proposed the idea for an information management system to his managers at CERN. The system would use hypertext to connect documents on separate computers connected to the Internet.

At first, the managers' response was something along the lines of cool, but no thanks. But when Berners-Lee returned with a new-and-improved proposal a year later, the computer scientist was granted permission to work on the project. By 1991, it was ready to launch. Berners-Lee had developed HTML, HTTP and URLs — the building blocks for creating websites — all on his NeXT computer designed by Steve Jobs.

And so, with the creation of a single web page, the World Wide Web was born. And it's grown quite a bit since then. There were 10 websites by 1992, 3,000 websites by 1994 (after the W3 became public domain), and 2 million by the time the search engine Google made its debut in 1996.

It's worth mentioning that the first website was also lost . Excited by progress and unable at the time to fathom the true scope of the web's abilities, computer scientists didn't archive many of the very first websites. A project to restore the world's first web page was launched in 2013 by CERN.

But not to worry: It's back now, even at its origina l URL , for you to explore.

Josie Fischels is an intern on NPR's News Desk.

• Tim Berners-Lee
• World Wide Web

CERN Accelerating science

• short history web

A short history of the Web

The Web has grown to revolutionise communications worldwide

Where the Web was born

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather the focal point for an extensive community that includes more than 17 000 scientists from over 100 countries. Although they typically spend some time on the CERN site, the scientists usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Reliable communication tools are therefore essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

How the Web began

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990 . Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”.

By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating his ideas. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: " This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!! "

info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and Web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first Web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

This page contained links to information about the WWW project itself, including a description of hypertext, technical details for creating a Web server, and links to other Web servers as they became available.

The WWW design allowed easy access to existing information and an early web page linked to information useful to CERN scientists (e.g. the CERN phone book and guides for using CERN’s central computers). A search facility relied on keywords - there were no search engines in the early years.

Berners-Lee’s original Web browser running on NeXT computers showed his vision and had many of the features of current Web browsers. In addition, it included the ability to modify pages from directly inside the browser – the first Web editing capability. This screenshot shows the browser running on a NeXT computer in 1993 .

The Web extends

Only a few users had access to a NeXT computer platform on which the first browser ran, but development soon started on a simpler, ‘line-mode’ browser , which could run on any system. It was written by Nicola Pellow during her student work placement at CERN.

In 1991, Berners-Lee released his WWW software. It included the ‘line-mode’ browser, Web server software and a library for developers. In March 1991, the software became available to colleagues using CERN computers. A few months later, in August 1991, he announced the WWW software on Internet newsgroups and interest in the project spread around the world.

Going global

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Kunz and Louise Addis, the first Web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, which was sophisticated but available only on NeXT machines. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-Window System. Notable among these were MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from technical publisher O'Reilly Books, and Erwise by Finnish students from Helsinki University of Technology.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of its Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of WorldWideWeb available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). 1994 was the “Year of the Web”. Initiated by Robert Cailliau, the First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 380 users and developers , and was hailed as the “Woodstock of the Web”.

As 1994 progressed, stories about the Web hit the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the newly-formed International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2). By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

Open standards

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: “WebCore”. The goal of the project was to form an international consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN to join MIT and founded the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Meanwhile, with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, CERN decided that further web development was an activity beyond the laboratory’s primary mission. A new European partner for W3C was needed.

The European Commission turned to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controls (INRIA), to take over CERN's role. In April 1995, INRIA became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996. In 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics) took over the role of European W3C Host from INRIA. In 2013, W3C announced Beihang University as the fourth Host. In September 2018, there were more than 400 member organisations from around the world.

Websites at 30 - how much has the internet changed?

There are currently over 1.86 billion websites online - so where do they go next?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Shortly after, the first website ever was launched, on August 6, 1991 -- and thirty years on, the look, design and functionality of a website has completely transformed.

To celebrate this, we've taken a look at some of the key launches and developments, highlighting how the website as we know it has changed so much over the years.

• Check out our list of the  best free web hosting  services out there
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Websites at 30 - the key dates

In 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain and later made a release available with an open licence. A year later the first blog surfaced, created by then-student Justin Hall as a place to publish his writing. Links.net consisted entirely of brief posts, containing links and some of his thoughts on the content within.

By 1995, Jeff Bezos had launched one of the biggest global ecommerce websites to date - Amazon , which was initially introduced as an ecommerce platform for books - and in 2001 Wikipedia went live, after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

As of June 18, 2021, there are over 1.86 billion websites online, with Siteefy noting that more than 547,200 new websites are created globally every day.

Commenting on the progression websites have made since the very first one created, Fabio Torlini, SVP & MD International at WP Engine, said: “Fast forward three decades after the first website was launched, the web is now central to all commerce. Entire livelihoods rely on the web."

"In fact, the economy for WordPress, the open source platform and ecosystem on which almost half of all websites are built, is estimated at a staggering $596.7bn. If WordPress were a country, its economy would rank above Sweden’s as 39th largest in the world.”

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What about web hosting?

Web hosting providers have been on a major growth journey since the launch of GeoCities in 1994 allowed users to upload pages of content online that were relevant to the subject of the content.

Before this, to host a website on the internet, an individual or company would be required to have their own computer or server. As the demand grew, web hosting services began to pop up and offer to host websites on their own servers, eradicating the need for individuals or organizations to own their own infrastructure that was needed to host a website.

Now, there are over 330,000 web hosting providers worldwide, with GoDaddy holding nearly 20% of the market, followed by Amazon AWS, 1&1 , and Hostgator , according to the Hosting Tribunal .

The future of websites

With all the rapid development, the natural progression would be to ask "what is next for websites?"

Torlini added that the pandemic has accelerated web trends like online shopping, and WP Engine research found that three-quarters (75%) of Gen Z Brits and two-thirds (67%) of British Boomers say they plan to shop online either entirely or at least part of the time in the next year.

"That means the physical world needs a better link to the digital world. For example, when consumers are buying a premium product like a new car or designer clothes, today’s online experiences fall far short of the in-store equivalent," he said.

"Websites aren’t fit to provide or reflect the kinds of high-end experiences consumers expect when buying, say, an SUV or a diamond ring. And luxury businesses aren’t the only ones that must rethink their web strategy to take advantage of the web’s massive economic potential.”

With all the change that has happened over three decades, the trend of "continual expansion" is evident. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) continues to take the center stage in website development, the number of efficient websites taking up space online will continue increasing rapidly. 

It's been a whirlwind first 30 years for the humble website, and given the rapid rate of development over the years, it's fair to say that they should still be around in another 30 - but what they will look like is anyone's guess.

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Abigail is a B2B Editor that specializes in web hosting and website builder news, features and reviews at TechRadar Pro. She has been a B2B journalist for more than five years covering a wide range of topics in the technology sector from colocation and cloud to data centers and telecommunications. As a B2B web hosting and website builder editor, Abigail also writes how-to guides and deals for the sector, keeping up to date with the latest trends in the hosting industry. Abigail is also extremely keen on commissioning contributed content from experts in the web hosting and website builder field.

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17 Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work

By lucas reilly | nov 22, 2013.

The golden age of dial-up is over, but these Internet fossils will make you feel like it’s 1996 all over again.

1. Space Jam (1996)

A starry background, cheesy graphics, and Michael Jordan? It’s like 1996 left us a time capsule of awesome.

2. Internet Explorer is EVIL! (1998)

When Microsoft made its users install Internet Explorer One, one customer wasn’t happy about the change.

3. Ask Dr. Internet (1996)

Ask Dr. Internet is one of the oldest question-and-answer relics on the web. Take that, Jeeves.

4. Three Rivers Stadium (1998)

Once home to the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers, Three Rivers Stadium had a date with the wrecking ball in 2000. The website remains in denial.

5. Fogcam! (1994)

The oldest continuously running webcam on the interwebs, FogCam has loomed over a San Francisco State University courtyard since 1994.

6. You’ve Got Mail (1998)

Warner Brothers still won’t close the book on the movie’s website.

7. Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches (1994)

Are you worried that your Pop-Tarts will turn your toaster into a flamethrower? There’s a site for that. Thanks, 1994!

8. The Robert Deniro Page (1999)

Stay updated on what Robert Deniro was doing 14 years ago.

9. Klingon Language Institute (1996)

From the beginning, the Internet has been the best place to nerd out.

10. CNN’s O.J. Simpson Trial Page (1996)

As eyes glued to the O.J. murder trial, CNN collected all of its coverage in this web portal.

11. Welcome to Netscape (1994)

Netscape may be gone, but the original communications site lives on. But remember, “To get around, just single-click on any blue or purple word or phrase.”

12. Fantasy Baseball Home Page (1996)

For those of us hoping that Fred McGriff, Greg Maddux, Tino Martinez, and Mo Vaughn will make a comeback.

13. Washington Post ’s “Year in Review” (1996)

When the Macarena made front-page news.

14. Arngren (2004)

Includes: helicopters, Santa Claus, hovercraft, dinosaurs, robots, and one big design headache.

15. Bob Dole/Jack Kemp Presidential Campaign (1996)

In case Ross Perot is all you remember.

16. Amanda Please (2002)

Penelope Taynt’s obsession hasn’t waned, please.

17. Zombo (1999)

Wait for it, wait for it…

For more vintage websites, check out the archive of Internet fossils at {404} Page Found!

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Here's How History's Biggest Websites Evolved Over The Last Decade

It's amazing how much can change in just a few years;  internet trends move so quickly that it's easy to forget how young the web really is. The evolution of website design can be clearly seen in past iterations of popular sites, as some of the biggest companies in the world started off with comically basic homepages. 

How websites have changed over the years is a direct reflection on the corresponding companies' values, products, and business savvy. While the gradual evolution of popular websites like Facebook and Google might seem imperceptible to people who use them everyday, when one compares these sites' modern layouts to those that came before, it's remarkably easy to see how far digital standards have come. 

Apple introduced its first successful computer, the Apple II, in 1977 . While super primitive versions of their website have been reported as far back as 1992,  the official Apple Online Store was launched on November 10, 1997. Early versions of the site were little more than collections of images, and users couldn't search for specific pages, as websites could not feature text boxes for people to type in. 

Today, the push is on for ever-smaller products. With new technology like the Apple Watch and yearly updates to the iPhone line, there is a whole new range of gadgets to shop for on Apple's website. The site has advanced with the company, and the modern search bar allows users to peruse purchasable products, store locations, and troubleshooting FAQs all from a single place. The company has seen major financial success as well. In July 2018, it hit a  $1 trillion market cap , making it the first publicly traded company to do so. 

Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Thefacebook began as a college-exclusive social networking site. Initially, the site was only for Zuckerberg's fellow students at Harvard University, but in the following years he expanded it to include other colleges and high schools. By 2007 , Facebook was available to anyone with an email address, and included features like classified ads and the ability to send friends gifts. 

Facebook has added many new features to improve the user's experience, from being able to "hate" and "love" posts as well as "like" them, to expanding the Messenger app to allow people to text and call each other over WiFi. The old classified ads are now a full-blown shopping feature, where people can sell things in a manner that resembles Craigslist or OfferUp. The main focus of the site is now connecting people around the world, and many other sites allow users to log in using their Facebook account. 

The online bidding site eBay was founded in 1995 by San Jose resident Pierre Omidyar. The site was originally called AuctionWeb, and began with the goal of "bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace." In September of 1997, the site was officially renamed eBay, and in the decade that followed, the company expanded worldwide, to the point that the site was worth $7.7 billion in early 2008.  

The basic premise of eBay has not changed; it's still a bidding site where people can sell things to each other. However the site now sports a much sleeker look, and the categories have become noticeably more navigable. Now, buyers can shop for anything they can dream up, and users have the option of buying new items directly from companies, rather than from other users.

Google has been around since 1998, and it quickly expanded to become a multi-focus company that served many of its customers' needs. By the end of 1998, Google's search engine had indexed roughly 60 million pages,  and it was one of the first services to rank search results based on "links and judgements made by other respected sites." By 2004, Google had launched Gmail, with Google Maps coming in 2005, and Google Chrome in 2008. 

Google has continued to introduce new features like Google+ and Google Drive, and passed the 1 billion unique visitors mark in 2011. They are still a world leader in the search engine category, and have increased their use of fun, topical "doodles" on the homepage. As of 2016, the search engine indexes 130 trillion web pages , and refreshes billions of times every month. 

In 2005, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman wanted to create a mobile sandwich ordering app. When that didn't work out, they created Reddit, "the front page of the internet," where users could share all sorts of links, including news, pop culture, sports, and politics. Users could also create their own communities of shared areas of interest called subreddits. A place of free speech and expression, where users could regulate content with voting, Reddit operated without strict rules , so many subreddits featured explicit and controversial content. 

As the site gained popularity, Reddit became the target of controversy for its subreddit /r/jailbait, which featured suggestive photos of underage girls. Although the site has a strong stance on not banning subreddits, /r/jailbait was officially shut down in October 2011. Soon after, other distasteful subreddits, including /r/Creepshots, which had sexualized pictures of unsuspecting women, met a similar fate. When Ellen Pao became CEO in 2015, Reddit banned five subreddits for issues related to harassment . This led to many Reddit users joining Voat, a similar aggregated content site that claims to allow any controversial yet legal content . In 2018, under CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit moderates controversial subreddits that are illegal or can be potentially harmful to users.

In 2005, the video hosting site  YouTube  came onto the scene, and proved to be one of the fastest growing websites in history. One year later, it was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. The original design was heavily influenced by social networking sites (notably Myspace), and allowed users to post comments on channels, leave video responses, and add friends (in addition to subscribers). 

While YouTube has backed away from its social networking dreams, that didn't stop it from becoming the world's second most popular website in 2017 ( according to Alexa Internet ). As of 2018, the site has 1.57 billion monthly active users , and 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. YouTube Red officially launched in 2015, and aims to break into the streaming market that's dominated by sites like Netflix and Hulu. Since YouTube Red also offers commercial-free music streaming, Spotify is another major competitor to the service. 

Amazon began as an online book retailer in 1995. During its first few years, the company was horribly understaffed, and whenever an order came in, everyone would gather around to discuss whether they knew the customer.  By 1998, the company had expanded to offer more than just books, which led to an absolutely insane Christmas season. Work basically never stopped, and employees slept in their cars so that they didn't have to leave the office.

Today, you can order items from Amazon's website and have them delivered to you by drone . Shoppers can order anything under the sun, from electronics to groceries. Amazon has introduced the Echo voice-activated home system, and has made many updates and revisions to its original Kindle. Additionally, the company has introduced "Dash Buttons" that instantly rerorder specific items when pressed. Unfortunately, working conditions have not improved for all the company's employees . Factory workers are still underpaid, overworked, and Amazon even keeps full-time "coaches" employed to push underlings to move faster. 

Etsy was founded in 2005, and gave artists around the world a way to sell their hand-made goods. They grew quickly, and generated $26 million in sales  just two years later. In the beginning, the site had mostly "non-professional" shops, with many people selling simple arts and crafts.

Today, Etsy is an internet giant with shares available in the stock exchange. The shops are much more polished, and many people who design clothing, accessories, and home decor make their living through the site. The shopping process is more streamlined, and there are added levels of security for both buyers and sellers.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia was an online encyclopedia with a catch. There would be no centralized editor; instead, the people could make edits themselves. By 2002, the English language section of the site had over 100,000 articles. 

Modern-day Wikipedia has not changed very much at all. It is still a free (and therefore often unreliable) encyclopedia made by the people for the people, and it's also now a great source of free-to-use photographs. The biggest change is that, as of 2015, the English language section is now home to over five million articles, and the site as a whole boasts around 45 million.

In 1995, Craigslist began as a site for classified ads in San Francisco . Founder Craig Newmark wanted to create a place for community members to connect, whether it was to sell something or to hire someone for a gig.

After first spreading to a handful of other US cities, Craigslist can now used all over the world. The beautiful thing is that almost nothing has been changed over the past ten years; it's still a super-basic format, no bells and whistles, and no ads to clutter up the page besides the ones that the community has posted.

When it launched in 1995, Yahoo was one of the many search engines competing for supremacy, and also offered an email service and news outlet. They were doing very well during the dotcom boom, and in 2008 the owners turned down a $44.6 billion acquisition deal from Microsoft.

Yahoo is now primarily a news site, and although the search engine still exists, it lost out to Google when it came time for the public to crown a default search engine. It still offers email services, but they are no longer a popular choice. In 2016, the site was purchased by Verizon for $4.6 billion dollars; a disappointing number compared to the offer from Microsoft in 2008.

Initially called Quantum computer services, AOL came onto the scene in 1989 (the name was changed two years later in 1991, and stands for America Online). The web giant played a critical role in getting people online for the first time, and effectively launched the internet boom. At first, the main way AOL gained subscribers was by sending out free floppy discs (and later CDs)  that helped people log on and sign up. According to Jan Barndt, the former Chief Marketing Officer at AOL, at its height "50% of the CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it. We were logging in new subscribers at the rate of one every six seconds." By 2001, AOL had merged with Time Warner, but in 2009, it had spun off into a separate company once again.

The site's appearance is more modern looking, and still offers news and email services (although AOL is nowhere close to how popular it once was). In 2015, Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 million, and in 2017, the once-ubiquitous AIM service shut down for good. As of 2015, the site was still pulling an average of  about 396 million monthly users. 

Long before smart phones, people used paper maps to get around, and MapQuest began as the cartographic services division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons in 1967. The MapQuest website launched in 1996, and gave people easy access to maps, as well as the ability to receive step-by-step directions to their destinations. In the '90s, the website was extremely simple, and there was no autocomplete feature that allowed users to search for locations (if you wanted to go somewhere, you needed to type out the full name or address). 

MapQuest has updated their interface with a more modern look, and has added features that allow users to personalize their directions. They were also the first major mapping site to embrace open-source mapping, and have survived in spite of the success of Google Maps. While the site's popularity has been eclipsed by Google and Apple's mapping services (which come pre-installed in most modern smart phones), as of 2015, MapQuest was still pulling 40 million unique visitors a month, most of whom came from North America. 

TripAdvisor

Though it has always been focused on helping people find their ideal vacation spots, TripAdvisor was very different when it first launched in 2000. The site's founder wanted a place where people could post their own reviews on a whim, and before long, the number of user-generated reviews surpassed the amount of professionally written ones. 

Today, reviews on TripAdvisor  are coveted in almost every country around the globe. The site produces its own travel content, but is still focused on providing reliable user reviews of restaurants, hotels, and attractions world-wide. In addition to reviews, users are now able to tag locations, so that others can search for things like "the best brunch places in..." or "the best nightclubs in..."They are also considered a model of efficiency, as they took $4 million in startup money and turned it into billions of dollars.

• Interesting
• Then & Now
• Weird History

A look at stuff that's always been around, then and now.

What 8 Famous Websites Looked Like When They First Launched

Every popular online service had to start somewhere. You might be surprised at what your favorite site used to look like.

The internet has come a long way since its birth. While it seems like websites such as Netflix, Twitch, and Reddit have been with us since the beginning, these are relatively recent innovations in the history of the World Wide Web.

We're going to take a trip down memory lane and look at what some of the most famous websites looked like when they first launched. You'll be surprised at how much they've changed.

(Note: For the most part, we're reversing the clock with the help of The Wayback Machine . Some images may be broken because of this.)

Reddit bills itself as "the front page of the internet" and has done so since its humble beginnings in 2005. Dreamt up by then-college students Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, Reddit is a place for users to chat and share images and videos with others.

While Reddit underwent a major redesign in 2018, the fundamental layout of the website has remained unchanged since it began—presenting submissions in a ranked list that you can vote on.

But did you know that Reddit didn't have a comment system at launch? It took six months for that feature to arrive.

Related: What Is Reddit and How Does It Work?

Twitch launched in June 2011, created as a way for people to stream video games. It was a spin-off of Justin.tv, a now-defunct streaming website that focused on real-life streams.

The site's slogan was "better than real sports," which is amusing to consider now that esports is so popular and you can make a living playing video games . The design was darker than it is now, though still put streamers and the different games being played front and center.

Nowadays, Twitch is owned by Amazon, allows streams in other areas like music, and nets over 15 million daily users.

Twitter is one of the most popular websites on the internet and it has only grown since launching publicly in July 2006. It was originally designed as a way for people to share 140 character thoughts with others, which could be submitted via SMS or on the web.

Many people now access Twitter through smartphone apps and you can no longer text your Tweets. And while the core concept of a feed of Tweets remains the same, the design has changed with the introduction of features like embedded media, likes, Retweets, and more.

When Eric Yuan launched Zoom in August 2012, he might have had strong hopes for the service. In fact, it started off strong, as Zoom had 400,000 users by the end of its first month.

However, not even Yuan could have predicted the incredible surge that Zoom would see from the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020, as people scrambled to talk to colleagues, friends, and family.

At first, Zoom allowed video conferences with up to 15 participants, though this was boosted to 25 a few months later.

Its original website looks amusingly simple, showing four people on an iPhone, and a positive quote from The Wall Street Journal proudly displayed. Now, Zoom's homepage boasts testimonials from some of the largest companies in the world.

5. Wikipedia

If you've been on the internet, you've been on Wikipedia. It's used by students to write essays, scholars to explore history, or just to look up your favorite celebrity's age. The free encyclopedia received its first edit on January 15, 2001, and now receives nearly 500 million monthly readers.

From its launch, Wikipedia's homepage highlighted news stories and related entries. It also directed users towards categories. The current homepage still does this, though it focuses on a few primary groups.

Missing are the now-popular featured article, "on this day," and "did you know" boxes, which have been standard on Wikipedia for years.

There are plenty of reasons to subscribe to Netflix , but chances are that you already do. Netflix is not only the largest streaming service, but also one of the most popular websites in the world.

It might be hard to imagine now, but the home entertainment market was very different when Netflix began in 1997. People would pay to rent DVDs (then a new technology), which would be sent through the mail. It was the very first online DVD rental shop. Monthly subscriptions arrived in 1999.

As such, Netflix's original website is extremely different from how it appears today. There was no online video streaming. No rows of content to endlessly scroll. Instead, you could browse Netflix's DVD collection, see what was featured and recently released, and place your order.

7. Tripadvisor

If you're planning a vacation or looking for somewhere to eat, chances are you turn to Tripadvisor. The travel website is known primarily for collecting user reviews of hotels, rentals, attractions, and more.

When Tripadvisor was founded in February 2000, it was designed to help you search the web to find personalized travel information. It essentially planned to become the Google of travel and license its technology to partners.

The first iteration of the website reflected that. It even had a charming directions page, leading visitors to the Tripadvisor office:

There is a pizza place and a dry cleaner on the first floor. There is a white hen pantry across the street. If you pass a Roche Bros supermarket on the right hand side you have gone too far.

8. AliExpress

AliExpress is a China-based consumer shopping site that launched in 2010, as a spin-off from the wholesale site Alibaba. AliExpress doesn't sell anything itself, but rather hosts third-party sellers. It's popular in Russia, Latin America, and the US, though serves plenty of countries.

AliExpress is known for its cheap products and its original homepage heavily leans into that, with products like handbags, notebooks, and wedding dresses all being advertised at bargain prices.

Today, the website has an updated brand, but still uses the same design with a top menu, shopping categories on the left, and a central slider to showcase the latest deals.

Related: Tips to Buy Safely on AliExpress and Avoid Frauds or Scams

What Does the Future of the Web Hold?

You might visit lots of these websites every single day. While it might seem like they've been around forever, many of them are recent innovations.

It'll be interesting to see how these websites continue to change (or not!) over the coming years, and how recent technology like IoT, AI, and virtual reality play into that.

How Many Websites Are There in the World?

Last updated: February 27, 2024

Currently, there are around 1.09 billion websites in the World. 18% of these websites are active, 82% are inactive.

websites are active

new websites are created every day

new websites are created every hour

new websites are created every minute

new websites are created every second

new websites by the time you are done reading this article

Table of Contents

How Many Websites Are There?

How Many Active Websites Are There?

How Many Webpages Are There?

How Many Domains Are There?

How Many Websites Are Created Every Day?

How Many Websites Are There in the US?

How Many Websites Are Mobile-Friendly?

How Many Websites Are on Google?

What Is the Most Visited Website in the World?

The Reasons for the Growth

What Was the First Website

How Big Is the Internet Today?

Frequently Asked Questions

How many websites are on the Internet?

While the exact number of websites keeps changing every second, there are well over  1 billion  sites on the world wide web ( 1,086,916,398 according to Netcraft’s February 2024 Web Server Survey compared to  1,127,630,293  in February 2023).

The milestone of 1 billion websites was reached in September 2014  followed by a bounce back to under 1 billion for one and half years.

The total number of websites on the Internet reached 1 billion again only in March 2016.

Today this number continues to change  as you read this article .

1 billion websites milestone

Total Number of Websites by Year

The total number of websites in the world has been confirmed by NetCraft and was published in its February 2024 Web Server Survey.

However, it is worth noting that websites are added and subtracted  on a regular basis .

So, for a time this number fluctuated above and below the 1 billion mark.

For example, in August 2012 a full 40 million hostnames were removed from 242 IP addresses. This considerably reduced the number of existing websites for a period of time.

By March 2016, the web  no longer went below a billion websites .

It is amazing to consider the sheer growth of the Internet which started  with 1 website  in 1991 to  over a billion today .

Usenet (1990)

One of the first websites to appear on the internet was IMDB, starting out as a list of “actresses with beautiful eyes” in 1990.

Run and pee

There is a website (now it’s an app), curiously named Run & Pee, the sole purpose of which is helping with WC breaks during movies, so you don’t miss anything important.

Internet Tools

The internet is a phenomenon that has made our lives so much easier. Today, there is an infinite number of different online tools for every need you can imagine!

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Although there are over a billion websites out there, not all of them are active.

Only about  18%  of all websites in the world are  active  and being used in some fashion.

The remaining  82%  of all websites are  not active . Instead, most of them are parked domains or have a similar function.

As of  February 2024 , there are 192,888,216  active websites and  894,028,182  inactive websites in the World.

In other words, the total number of active websites is almost  5x  less than the total number of inactive websites.

This is how a similar ratio from 2021 looks visually in a chart:

The number of inactive websites is approximately 5 times more than the total number of active websites.

Only about 18% of all websites in the world are active. The remaining 82% are inactive websites.

This is a big difference.

Plus, there are also websites that do not get regular updates.

This means that the actual number of truly active, working sites may be a much smaller fraction.

So, the next time someone asks you about the total quantity of websites on the Internet, do not forget to clarify if they mean all websites or only the active websites.

As shown in this chapter, the difference between these two can be huge .

There are more than 50 billion web pages on the Internet.

Okay, we already know how many websites are on the Internet. Now, what about the web pages?

How many pages are on the Internet?

As you probably know, a webpage is something different from a website.

Web pages are compound parts of websites and sites usually consist of one or more web pages.

For example, what you are reading now is the “How many websites are there?” page on Siteefy.

Siteefy in this case is the website.

“How many websites are there?” is a webpage.

Currently, the absolute number of all existing web pages on the Internet is unknown .

But, there is an estimation.

According to the  research project  (updated daily) by  Tilburg University  (The Netherlands)  Indexed Web contains at least 4.77 billion pages (9 May 2023) .

But the actual size seems to be more than  50 billion  pages.

However, this number keeps changing in real-time. Just like most things associated with websites.

While part of web pages gets deleted from the Internet on a daily basis, the new portion emerges instead.

This is for example how the number of web pages on the Internet was changing during June, July, and August (2021):

4.77 billion pages

Indexed Web contains at least 4.77 billion pages (May 2023, Tilburg University Research).

The Total Number of Indexed Web Pages

As of 21 April 2023, there are over 30 billion web pages indexed on the world wide web.

Roughly 350.4 million domain registrations have been made as of Q4 2022.

A domain name is the  URL  (Uniform Resource Locator) or simply  the address of a website.

All those millions of individuals, businesses, and organizations own domain names to provide the general public easy access to their web resources.

So, how many domains are there on the Internet?

There is no precise number of all active domain names out there. This figure is ever-changing.

However, we know that approximately  350.4 million  registrations of domain names have been made  as of Q4 2022 .

No doubt the number has changed since then, it is  8.7 million  (or  2.6 percent ) more than in the previous year, but about 16 million  (or  4.3 percent ) less than Q4 2020.

Most of the growth occurs in the  .com  and  .net  top-level domains – approximately  173.8 million  domain name registrations.

Symbolics.com

Symbolics.com is the world’s first registered domain name. It was registered on March 15, 1985.

How Many Domain Names Are There?

173.8 million

As of Q4 2022, there are 173.8 million .com and .net domain name registrations in the domain name base.

What is a Top-Level Domain (TLD)?

You may have noticed that the last segment of the domain name consists of a period and two to three letters. This section of the domain name is called the  domain extension  or more commonly the  top-level domain (TLD) . 

A domain name usually has two parts: a top-level domain (TLD) and a second-level domain (SLD). For example, in the URL www.siteefy.com TLD is .com and SLD is siteefy. 

TLD is the part of the domain that is right from the dot. SLD is the other part of it that is left from the dot. 

There are two main types of TLDs. One is generic while the other refers to the country. 

Typical generic TLDs include .com, .biz, .org, .net, and so on. 

A country-specific domain name is usually two letters that refer to a specific country such as .au for Australia. Alternatively, it can be made of two parts like co.uk for the United Kingdom.

There are currently  1,544 TLDs  (not associated with a country) in existence today.

Most of them only have a small number of domain name registrants.

However, this total might change on a daily basis. Some TLDs are regularly added while others are retired.

It’s no surprise that most domain names have .com at the end of their registration. 

The .com dominates domain names with others such as .net and .org ranking well behind. While other TLDs such as .xyz, for example, are making headway, it is .com which is far and away the most popular.

The latest available numbers for the entire TLD market show that .com represents nearly  160.5 million.  The next closest TLD is .cn (China) at  18.0 million .

In descending order, the remaining TLDs consist of the following;

Registered Domain Names by TLD

160.5 million

The latest available numbers for the entire TLD market show that .com represents nearly  160.5 million .

The next closest TLD is .cn (China) at  18.0 million .

Largest Top Level Domains by Domain Registrations

The largest top-level domain by domain registrations is .com followed by .cn and .de.

Domain Names Market Overview

Learn more about domain names here ➜ How Many Domains Are There? Ultimate Domain Name Stats

As per our calculations, approximately 175 new websites are created every minute! So around 252,000 new websites are created every day worldwide.

In the absence of any reliable data on this, the best thing we can do here is to come up with a rough estimation.

For the purposes of this section, we have measured the change in the total number of websites worldwide per minute. We found out that every minute the number of sites grew approximately by  175 .

This means that every 24 hours we get a 252,000 increase in the total number of websites worldwide!

However, the actual number of new websites being created every day is probably a little more.

As we know from the previous chapters, every day some part of web pages vanish from the Internet. Obviously, this applies to websites as well.

Respectively, the number above does not include those new websites that compensate the deleted ones. These websites, therefore, are not reflected in the total growth.

For that reason, the most accurate answer to this question would probably be that every day  slightly more than 252,000  new websites are created globally.

252,000 sites

Every 24 hours we get a 252,000 increase in the total number of websites worldwide!

Note: When we first calculated this in August 2018, there were about  380  new websites created each minute and  547,200  new websites created each day. As we can see, the rate at which the new websites get born declined by  46%  since then.

There are 133,361,676 websites in the US as of August 2021.

It is hard to answer this question. It is hard to do in a straightforward way.

Most of all, because it is not quite clear what we exactly mean when we say “websites in the US”.

Depending on the circumstances this can equally be a website:

• Hosted in the US;
• Physically managed from the US;
• Engaged in business in the US;
• Any combination of all three.

So, there is no clear definition of a US website.

A website is something that can be located in different places depending on how you look at it. The location of a given website may vary based on the specific perspective/criterion. 

For instance, let’s take a website hosted in the US, managed from Singapore, and exclusively involved in the EU market.

Where does this website belong? US, EU, or Singapore?

Another example would be the website hosted in the EU and doing business/being managed in the US. Is this an American website?

If the criterion is hosting  then:

• a website is an American in the first scenario;
• and European in the second.

Alternatively, if the criterion is the place of business/management then:

• the website is Singaporean/European in the first case;
• and American in the second.

So, yes, basically this depends.

As additional information, we can note that the number of hosts in the US was  505,000,000   in 2012 .

Today, in 2021 this number is probably way higher.

In parallel, when we say that a particular website is located somewhere we might also mean the domain name associated with that country.

In a standard case, a local website usually uses the national top-level domain (like co.uk, .ca, or .de). But US TLD which  .us  is not as popular as other country TLDs, so basing the count of the US websites on it would probably be unreliable.

What we can do instead is to look at the total number of domains managed by US registrars. Based on this specific criterion there are  133,361,676  websites in the US.

This is the number of domains registered by the US registrars as of August 2021.

505,000,000 websites hosted in the US

According to data, we can note that the number of hosts in the US was  505,000,000   in 2012 .

133,361,676 sites managed by the US registrars

The total number of domains managed by US registrars is  133,361,676  websites.

Number of Websites by Country

The data is based on the number of domains managed by registrars (August 2021, Data from RegistrarOwl).

133,361,676

This is the world map showing the domain name registration distribution per country, with the highest number (133,361,676) registered in the United States.

Currently, about 76.17% of the World’s top websites are mobile-friendly.

Mobile has become a big deal lately. With each coming year more and more things start to happen on mobile:

• website visits;
• conversions;
• content consumption;

The whole Internet firmly moves towards mobile .

In these conditions, shifting towards responsiveness and mobile-friendliness is  not  an option,  but a necessity .

Now, how many websites are mobile-friendly?

We suppose that currently:

• either the majority of existing websites are already mobile-friendly;
• or they are in the process of becoming so.

Particularly, taking into account the availability of responsive design.

However, currently, there are no reliable fresh stats on the exact number of mobile-friendly websites on the Internet.

The most up-to-date information on this matter is provided by Canonicalized in their  study  published on April 2, 2018. Canonicalized tested the top 1 million most popular websites in the world to see how mobile-friendly they are  using  Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test .

The data showed that  76.17%  of Alexa Top 1 million sites were mobile-friendly as of April 2018.

23.83%  websites were not mobile-friendly.

This is how the overall score distribution looked like:

23.83% of top million websites in the World are not mobile-friendly.

Mobile-Friendliness Across Top 1 Million Websites in the World

The data showed that  76.17%  of Alexa Top 1 Million sites were mobile-friendly as of April 2018.

Nevertheless, this data does not necessarily reflect on the whole Internet.

Alexa (retired since May 1, 2022) Top 1 million predominantly consists of major websites. These websites possess the necessary resources (both human and technology) to make a quick move to mobile.

When it comes to the rest of the Internet,  this is not always the case .

Therefore, we would humbly estimate that the mobile-friendliness of the whole World Wide Web is currently  at a significantly lower rate compared to the data provided above.

This is especially true about the old websites. Most of the new websites are responsive out of the box.

But we would expect these things to change at a lightning speed in the coming years as older websites either get vanished or are optimized for mobile.

Between 50 billion and hundreds of billions (the exact figure is unknown) web pages are currently indexed by Google. As for the websites, there is no official information on the number of websites in the Google Index.

Generally, search engines (including Google) focus more   on individual webpages,  not on websites.

The ultimate goal of any search engine (Including Google) is to provide the user with information that  matches their search intent as closely as possible . This usually results in individual pages being shown on search engine results pages (SERPs) instead of websites.

Therefore, there is currently  no reliable data on the number of websites in the Google index.

As for the webpages, according to  World Wide Web Size Project , the estimated number of webpages indexed in Google is about  50 billion .

But this number heavily fluctuates:

According to World Wide Web Size Project, the estimated number of webpages indexed in Google is about 50 billion.

Number of Pages Indexed by Google

As of 21 April 2023, Google had over 25 billion web pages in its index.

At the same time, Google on their official  How Search Works page  talks about  hundreds of billions  of webpages and other sources of information in their index.

But this number, as mentioned above, includes other types of content Google serves like videos, images, products, documents, books, etc.

So, it’s not completely clear how many hundreds of billions are that and what portion of those are webpages.

What is clear though is that the total number of webpages out there is  considerably more  than the total number of existing websites. The reason is obvious – as already mentioned above, a single website can include hundreds or even thousands of individual webpages.

So, naturally, there are way more web pages on the Internet than websites.

Most Visited Websites in the World

What is the most popular website in the world?

Google is currently the most popular website on the Internet according to Alexa Top 500 Global Sites Rating (retired since May 1, 2022) .

⚡ Check also ➜ How Many People Use Google per Day?

Here is how the Internet map of the most visited websites looks like:

Source:  The Internet Map

Google is indisputably number one in many parts of the globe.  But not everywhere.

In some countries, this is not the case.

For example, Baidu is the number one website in China. VK and Yandex are the most popular websites in Russia.

For better perspective here is the world map with the most popular website in every country:

Source: Oxford Internet Institute

As it is seen from the map, Google is not the most popular website everywhere in the world. However, on average it is still number one on a global scale.

Google is currently the most popular website and the most visited website in the world.

Most visited websites in the US 2021

Most visited websites in the world 2021.

22 minutes and 44 seconds

Besides being the most popular website in the World, Google is also the website with the longest average time spent on it. An average user spends approximately 22 minutes and 44 seconds per visit on Google.com. Facebook comes second right behind Google, with an average of 22 minutes and 43 seconds per visit. Youtube is the third with an average session length of 9 minutes and 15 seconds.

Back in 1999, the founders of Google wanted to sell their website and offered it to Excite for under 1 million USD, but Excite turned the offer down.

10.5% desktop traffic

In June 2021, Twitch.tv was ranked as the leading gaming website, accounting for around 10.5 percent of desktop traffic in the games subcategory. Roblox.com was the second with a 10.04 percent market share.

7.14% desktop traffic

At the same time, Booking.com accounted for over 7.14 percent of desktop traffic in the travel and tourism subcategory. Tripadvisor.com made it to second place with 2.15 percent.

14% desktop traffic

In the e-commerce subcategory, Amazon.com had more than 14 percent of all desktop visits. Second place went to ebay.com, with almost 3.5 percent.

All things considered, the growth of websites has been quite remarkable thanks in large part to a  decision taken on April 30th, 1993 by CERN .

This decision made the world wide web available on a basis that was free of royalties.

In essence,  it became a public domain which allowed people around the world to create their own websites.

It is interesting to note that the growth of the Internet started in the 1970s and continued on a limited basis until the early 1990s.

However, the world wide web itself is credited to  Tim Berners-Lee , who began it in March 1989 and  introduced the first server, browser, and editor along with HTTP and HTML .

While the growth of the web has been explosive, one of the biggest jumps occurred in 2013 when the web  grew by almost a third .

Today, Apache together with Nginx currently hosts just over half the websites that exist. However, Microsoft is closing fast and they are expected to get a bigger market share soon.

Tim Berners-Lee

The world wide web is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, who began it in March 1989 and introduced the first server, browser, and editor along with HTTP and HTML.

Note: Although it was expected that the number of websites will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, the actual figures indicate the opposite. We actively monitor website statistics in the World since 2015 and our data shows that  the total number of websites actually stopped growing after 2018.

Currently, around 2 billion people shop online worldwide generating $4.2 trillion in e-commerce sales.

99% internet penetration rate

Leading the list of internet penetration rates, – Denmark and UAE boast 99 percent of their population accessing the internet freely. The internet penetration rate for South Korea was reported at 98 percent, followed by Sweden and Switzerland at 97 percent.

55.6% of all websites

Currently, 55.6%  of all websites on the Internet are in English followed by: ➞ Russian – 5.0% ➞ Spanish – 4.9% ➞ German – 4.3% ➞ French – 4.2% ➞ Japanese – 3.6% ➞ Turkish – 2.4% ➞ Portuguese – 2.3%

What Was the First Website?

How many websites are there on the Internet today? 

Over a billion!  

But it all started with a single website.

The first website of the Internet went live on  August 6, 1991 . It was about the World Wide Web project itself.

Here is how the very first website on the Internet looked like:

As you can see from the screenshot, the contents of the website contained:

• some general information;
• instructions on hypertext;
• and some guidelines on creating a web page.

The first website of the Internet was hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer ( this computer is still at CERN ).

Today we exactly know what the very first website was and how it did look.  In 2013 CERN restored the world’s first website on its original address .

As a result, the first website of the internet is  still available today .

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain . This allowed the web to develop and flourish at an unbelievable pace.

This is was the exact moment when the Internet started changing the World.

30 April 1993

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web in the public domain.

The size, scope, and amount of information on the Internet  keeps growing all the time ,  non-stop, 24/7/365 .

Accordingly, any data on this available today will most likely expire already tomorrow.

The Internet is huge in terms of its size. It contains a massive amount of constantly growing information in different formats (text, images, video, audio, etc.).

Billions of people contribute to the size of the Internet every single day in the following ways:

• User-generated text content ( Instagram , Quora , Reddit , other social media posts and comments, blog comments, forum posts, etc.)
• Editorial text and media content ( blogs , news, research, studies, new websites , books etc.)
• Images and video uploads (YouTube, Instagram etc.)
• Messenger content ( WhatsApp , Telegram )
• and other forms of activity happen  24/7  on the Internet

As of the latest available statistics, the Internet has roughly  5.18 billion users :

This represents about  65% of the total population of the earth!

Imagine all these folks non-stop making the Internet even bigger.

Every single second .

Interestingly though, the Internet does not seem to be that big in physical size.

The physical size of the Internet was calculated in 2015.  University of Leicester (UK) students estimated  that printing out the entire web on paper would take  only about 2%  of the Amazon rain-forest.

Yes, this number might not be that impressive. But the Internet has grown considerably since then.

Here is another interesting visualization of the size of the Internet:

5.18 billion

As of the latest available statistics, the Internet has roughly 5.18 billion users — which represents about 65% of the total population of the earth!

4.32 billion

92.6 percent (4.32 billion) of all Internet users used mobile devices at some point to go online.

There is no meaning behind the “Fi” of Wi-Fi. The inventor picked a random syllable due to it rhyming with Hi-Fi.

According to physicist Russell Seitz (who weighed billions of electrons), the total weight of the entire Internet is approximately 2 ounces or 50 grams.

How Much Information Is on the Internet?

The total amount of information on the Internet is not easy to accurately assess.

It grows every second. Moreover, it depends on how you measure the information.

It is estimated that by 2025, given the current rate of growth, the global traffic on the Internet will reach  175 zettabytes :

To put in layman’s terms,  a single zettabyte can hold 36,000 hours of HD video .

There is little doubt that the Internet will continue to grow in terms of its size, scope, and information. This is thanks to the world’s growing dependence on the web for information, communication, business, and entertainment.

175 zettabytes

It is estimated that by 2025, given the current rate of growth, the global traffic on the Internet will reach 175 zettabytes.

The future of the Internet is Li-Fi, which uses light frequencies instead of radio frequencies. This technology promises to be more than 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.

Monaco, Singapore, and Hong Kong have the fastest average fixed broadband Internet speed in the world, Singapore taking first place with 250.35 Mbps.

51.4% access rate

In 2019, the average global Internet access rate was 51.4%. It is estimated that 86% of people living in developed countries had internet access while only 44.4% of people had access in developing countries.

Types of Websites on the Internet

Websites can be classified in types or categories based on several criteria, including but not limited to their technical nature, theme or topic.

However, regardless of the criterion, there is hardly an exhaustive list of  website types  or categories as such.

Nevertheless, if we consider the essence of the website as an online platform providing some sort of content, we can refer to the neat classification put together by Method & Class that we would like to share in this article.

So,  according to M&G typically, a website falls under one of the following broad categories :

• Static website (also referred as non-editable brochure website);
• Editable brochure website that gets updated;
• Editable, dynamic website, with user engagement (login areas etc);
• E-commerce site;
• Website based on some sort of web application.

The Internet is the endless universe of websites.

However, every single one among 1 billion+ existing websites most likely falls under one of the five categories of websites mentioned above.

Our calculations show that about  4.82 billion  people were online in August 2021. We expect this number to reach  5.14 billion  by 2023. Learn more on this here:  How Many People are Online

Currently, there are  more than 7000  living languages around the world. Amongst them,  less than 200  have a digital existence as of today. According to  W3Techs  currently,  55.6%  of all websites on the internet are in English followed by: ➞ Russian – 5.0% ➞ Spanish – 4.9% ➞ German – 4.3% ➞ French – 4.2% ➞ Japanese – 3.6% ➞ Turkish – 2.4% ➞ Portuguese – 2.3% However, because the Internet is a super dynamic ever-changing place these proportions keep changing too. ⚡ Check also ➜ What’s the World’s Most Translated Website?

Tons of them. 43 . 2%  of all websites on the entire internet use WordPress as their content management system. However, this figure goes down when we lift up the criterion and consider: ➞ top million websites – 36% ➞ top 100k websites – 20% ➞ and top 10k websites – 14% Nevertheless, the trend is evident. WordPress is less popular (relatively) among the world’s top websites compared to smaller websites. However, even a 43.2% share still looks pretty impressive. Look: 17 posts go live every second on WordPress! Every. Single. Second. Even your local coffee shop probably runs its website on WordPress. Why? Because WordPress: ➞ is fast and easy to set up ➞ is super flexible ➞ has a huge user community ➞ is effective and fairly simple to use You can have your website up and running literally in minutes with a WordPress page builder . Learn more about WordPress: – WordPress Pros and Cons – WordPress Tools – WordPress Tips – WordPress Deals & Promos – How to edit WordPress

The Internet as we know it today (The World Wide Web) was invented in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and already in 1990, the first web page went live. So, 1989 is the year Internet started. and Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the one who created the web.

The oldest website ever made was also the first website on the Internet created on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer. It was a very simple site with information about the World Wide Web. That website is still available  here , so you can go and checked how it looked and what was it all about. For more information, please check  this section above .

The first website ever created was made at CERN on a subdomain at cern.ch. .ch is the top-level domain for Switzerland. So, the first website on the Web used Swiss country top level domain.

There is no single number to answer this question in full. To give you an idea about the amount of data on the Internet we can refer to BBC Science Focus which estimates that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all together store a minimum of 1,200 petabytes of data . 1,200 petabytes means 1.2 million terabytes and one terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes. This estimation excludes other data storages though. More on this here: How Much Data and Content is Created Every Day?

No, currently there is no such list available (at least the one we know about).

🔥 Check also:

• 167+ Internet Statistics, Trends and Facts [Mobile Included]
• How Many Ads Do We See a Day?
• How Many People Use Google per Day?
• How Many Domains Are There? – Ultimate Domain Name Stats
• How Much Data and Content is Created Every Day?
• How Many People Are Online at Any Given Moment?
• https://www.azoquantum.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=68
• https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-much-data-is-on-the-internet/
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-called-wi-fi_l_5cace3f7e4b01bf960065841
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
• https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/the-surprising-first-thing-ever-sold-online/articleshow/49940821.cms
• https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20439301
• https://www.businessinsider.com/li-fi-is-100-times-faster-than-wifi-2015-11?IR=T
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/227082/countries-with-the-highest-internet-penetration-rate/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/262946/share-of-the-most-common-languages-on-the-internet/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/896772/countries-fastest-average-fixed-broadband-internet-speeds/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201901/most-visited-websites-worldwide-time-visit/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/544780/share-us-visitors-game-sites/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/459983/number-of-visits-to-travel-booking-sites-worldwide/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/1198949/most-visited-websites-in-the-retail-sector-worldwide/
• https://eastbayexpress.com/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20-1/
• https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
• https://www.shopify.com/blog/shopping-cart-abandonment#axzz2tmtb106t
• https://www.giganews.com/blog/archives/2008_12_01_archive.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft
• https://runpee.com/

Article by:

Thank you for every other magnificent article. Where else could anyone get that type of info in such an ideal manner of writing? I have a presentation subsequent week, and I’m at the look for such info.

Many website create also greater than many population in many country except china and india great statistic from china.

This was such a thorough and detailed article! What an interesting read. Thanks for sharing all of the statistics and graphs.

Still chuckling at the “run and pee” website. thank you for sharing this information.

What a very informative post! It was interesting to see your data and graphs. I am shocked that there are so many websites out there but only 17% is active. But then again, nobody ever said running a website was easy! LOL

Wow I loved taking in those stats! The mind boggles….especially at how many new websites are created every day. The rate of expansion of our digital footprint is quite phenomenal.

The numbers are really quite staggering. Imagine if you really believed the Internet was going to be as big as it is a new bottle of these really cool URLs. You could probably make a killing.

I find it fascinating that only 17% of all websites in the world are active. Seems like such a “waste”. It definitely would be interesting if someone ever did create a list of all the websites on the internet, I’d be interested to take a look at that.

Woah, That’s a huge number. Thanks for sharing this insightful article.

It’s amazing how websites evolved up to these days. the internet is huge now and we can find pretty much anything on it

These stats are mindblowing. especially how many websites are created every day. It’s good to know these and take notes of the numbers

Wow, what an informative and detailed post. Didn’t know much about it until now and definitely learned a lot. I love how simple and straight to the point the data and graphs are.

Wow, I learned so much in your post. I am surprised that there are only 17% active websites and so many inactive websites (and those can be considered junk). You gave us valuable insights that are very helpful for my blogging journey. Cheers!

What an interesting and informative post! Thanks for enlightening me.

Thank you for this information. I didn’t know that there is that much inactive websites. like a LOT! and the number of websites increased during pandemic. I learned something valuable today!

These stats are truly impressive. I never really put any thought into how many websites there are but this is so informative and detailed. I love the graphs you’ve shared.

OMG!!! 10000+ blogs are being created every hour. Interesting but was out of expectation. Thanks for representing this amazing truth!

Wow! That’s a lot. I have never really thought about it but it’s cool to see these figures. It’s amazing how many websites are created daily. It simply means that more and more people and businesses are going digital.

Amazing! Just when I thought I actually read too many blogs a day, do I discover that I am simply scratching the top-most surface! It’s actually good to know statistics like these. Thanks Nick, for sharing.

This is so crazy cool! I never knew that there were this many websites in the world!

So interesting and crazy! I had no idea there were so many websites.

Well that is some interesting information! I wonder why they don’t remove the inactive sites.

Wow! I have never thought about looking at the numbers. I see the numbers going even higher because of how the future of the world is being digitized.

The internet and websites are amazing. It’s fascinating how it’s grown and changed over the years.

But all of this is a deeply informative and interesting article that we should calmly reread!

Wow so many interesting stats here for sure. It is amazing how many sites that actually are out there.

I am not surprised that there are billions of websites. The digital world has grown so much over the years!

Fascinating web statistics! I had no idea there were so many pages and the majority are inactive!

Wow, that’s a lot of big numbers. I knew there were a lot, but seeing it in stats is awe-inspiring.

Wow! That is such an overwhelming number, but it makes sense. I’ve just never thought about it before!

Wow! That is incredible! I didn’t know that there are a lot of websites in this world.

This is a very interesting post! It was fascinating to look at your statistics and graphics. It amazes me that just 17% of all websites in the world are active. It would be fascinating if someone ever compiled a list of all the websites on the internet; I’d be eager to look at it. Thank again for informing me.

Wow, I had no idea how many websites were being created … by the hour. This article has some great info. It is interesting to me the percentage of inactive websites is over 80%.

I am so impressed with the details of your blog post. I am shocked by the number of inactive websites. This blog post is a good referral site for statistical data related to internet usage.

This is really interesting.

That is way more than I expected! Cool article!

My head is still swimming at the moment with all the stats I have just read! These numbers are hard to comprehend and online growth, in general, has just been phenomenal. Interesting that the growth stats seemed to have plateaued a bit at the moment since 2018. The numbers overall though will no doubt continue to grow well into the future. It will be interesting to see if the relative amount of 17% being active will change as well.

Wow! You have done an amazing job gathering so much data. It’s interesting to see that the internet is so immense and full of information.

I find this to be fascinating as I consider an additional website. Personally, I’m trying to decide if I should just add another category to my current website I am not sure that I really want another whole new website

Oh wow! That’s interesting and cool that they can do this… Fun facts I always enjoy seeing. That’s a lot of website activities going on!

These numbers are overwhelming. A lot of websites are being made every single day.

These are fascinating facts! Im not surprised that Google is the most popular website in the world.

This is such a fascinating article! I never knew there were over a billion websites online and growing by 2,000 in the time it took to review this article! Technology and Google have truly changed our lives!

Wow! I had no idea there were so many websites! Also the number of inactive websites is very interesting.

Such a fun article. hard to believe that over 80% of websites aren’t even active anymore!

Wow! This is awesome! I had no idea we have this many websites in the world.

Wow! The numbers are fascinating. I’ve never known of these facts until now. There are indeed an enormous number of websites worldwide.

I enjoy statistics like this. Mind-boggling how many new websites are created in a day.

This is a great article! I had no idea! Thanks for sharing!

Those are some incredible numbers! I remember when the internet was just starting! It is amazing how much things have grown over time.

Wow! I am actually surprised by the number of inactive websites since they cost money to maintain. Fascinating

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When Online Content Disappears

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later, table of contents.

• Webpages from the last decade
• Links on government websites
• Links on news websites
• Reference links on Wikipedia
• Posts on Twitter
• Acknowledgments
• Collection and analysis of Twitter data
• Data collection for World Wide Web websites, government websites and news websites
• Data collection for Wikipedia source links
• Evaluating the status of pages and links
• Definition of links

Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part of the study looks at a representative sample of webpages that existed over the past decade to see how many are still accessible today. For this analysis, we collected a sample of pages from the Common Crawl web repository for each year from 2013 to 2023. We then tried to access those pages to see how many still exist.

A second part of the study looks at the links on existing webpages to see how many of those links are still functional. We did this by collecting a large sample of pages from government websites, news websites and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia .

We identified relevant news domains using data from the audience metrics company comScore and relevant government domains (at multiple levels of government) using data from get.gov , the official administrator for the .gov domain. We collected the news and government pages via Common Crawl and the Wikipedia pages from an archive maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation . For each collection, we identified the links on those pages and followed them to their destination to see what share of those links point to sites that are no longer accessible.

A third part of the study looks at how often individual posts on social media sites are deleted or otherwise removed from public view. We did this by collecting a large sample of public tweets on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) in real time using the Twitter Streaming API. We then tracked the status of those tweets for a period of three months using the Twitter Search API to monitor how many were still publicly available. Refer to the report methodology for more details.

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

• A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

• For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.

How this report defines inaccessible links and webpages

There are many ways of defining whether something on the internet that used to exist is now inaccessible to people trying to reach it today. For instance, “inaccessible” could mean that:

• The page no longer exists on its host server, or the host server itself no longer exists. Someone visiting this type of page would typically receive a variation on the “404 Not Found” server error instead of the content they were looking for.
• The page address exists but its content has been changed – sometimes dramatically – from what it was originally.
• The page exists but certain users – such as those with blindness or other visual impairments – might find it difficult or impossible to read.

For this report, we focused on the first of these: pages that no longer exist. The other definitions of accessibility are beyond the scope of this research.

Our approach is a straightforward way of measuring whether something online is accessible or not. But even so, there is some ambiguity.

First, there are dozens of status codes indicating a problem that a user might encounter when they try to access a page. Not all of them definitively indicate whether the page is permanently defunct or just temporarily unavailable. Second, for security reasons, many sites actively try to prevent the sort of automated data collection that we used to test our full list of links.

For these reasons, we used the most conservative estimate possible for deciding whether a site was actually accessible or not. We counted pages as inaccessible only if they returned one of nine error codes that definitively indicate that the page and/or its host server no longer exist or have become nonfunctional – regardless of how they are being accessed, and by whom. The full list of error codes that we included in our definition are in the methodology .

Here are some of the findings from our analysis of digital decay in various online spaces.

To conduct this part of our analysis, we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl , an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.

Not surprisingly, the older snapshots in our collection had the largest share of inaccessible links. Of the pages collected from the 2013 snapshot, 38% were no longer accessible in 2023. But even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about one-in-five were no longer accessible just two years later.

We sampled around 500,000 pages from government websites using the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet, including a mix of different levels of government (federal, state, local and others). We found every link on each page and followed a random selection of those links to their destination to see if the pages they refer to still exist.

Across the government websites we sampled, there were 42 million links. The vast majority of those links (86%) were internal, meaning they link to a different page on the same website. An explainer resource on the IRS website that links to other documents or forms on the IRS site would be an example of an internal link.

Around three-quarters of government webpages we sampled contained at least one on-page link. The typical (median) page contains 50 links, but many pages contain far more. A page in the 90th percentile contains 190 links, and a page in the 99th percentile (that is, the top 1% of pages by number of links) has 740 links.

Other facts about government webpage links:

• The vast majority go to secure HTTP pages (and have a URL starting with “https://”).
• 6% go to a static file, like a PDF document.
• 16% now redirect to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to.

When we followed these links, we found that 6% point to pages that are no longer accessible. Similar shares of internal and external links are no longer functional.

Overall, 21% of all the government webpages we examined contained at least one broken link. Across every level of government we looked at, there were broken links on at least 14% of pages; city government pages had the highest rates of broken links.

For this analysis, we sampled 500,000 pages from 2,063 websites classified as “News/Information” by the audience metrics firm comScore. The pages were collected from the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet.

Across the news sites sampled, this collection contained more than 14 million links pointing to an outside website. 1 Some 94% of these pages contain at least one external-facing link. The median page contains 20 links, and pages in the top 10% by link count have 56 links.

Like government websites, the vast majority of these links go to secure HTTP pages (those with a URL beginning with “https://”). Around 12% of links on these news sites point to a static file, like a PDF document. And 32% of links on news sites redirected to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to – slightly less than the 39% of external links on government sites that redirect.

When we tracked these links to their destination, we found that 5% of all links on news site pages are no longer accessible. And 23% of all the pages we sampled contained at least one broken link.

Broken links are about as prevalent on the most-trafficked news websites as they are on the least-trafficked sites. Some 25% of pages on news websites in the top 20% by site traffic have at least one broken link. That is nearly identical to the 26% of sites in the bottom 20% by site traffic.

For this analysis, we collected a random sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages and examined the links in their “References” section. The vast majority of these pages (82%) contain at least one reference link – that is, one that directs the reader to a webpage other than Wikipedia itself.

In total, there are just over 1 million reference links across all the pages we collected. The typical page has four reference links.

The analysis indicates that 11% of all references linked on Wikipedia are no longer accessible. On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.

For this analysis, we collected nearly 5 million tweets posted from March 8 to April 27, 2023, on the social media platform X, which at the time was known as Twitter. We did this using Twitter’s Streaming API, collecting 3,000 public tweets every 30 minutes in real time. This provided us with a representative sample of all tweets posted on the platform during that period. We monitored those tweets until June 15, 2023, and checked each day to see if they were still available on the site or not.

At the end of the observation period, we found that 18% of the tweets from our initial collection window were no longer publicly visible on the site . In a majority of cases, this was because the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. For the remaining tweets, the account that posted the tweet was still visible on the site, but the individual tweet had been deleted.

Which tweets tend to disappear?

Tweets were especially likely to be deleted or removed over the course of our collection period if they were:

• Written in certain languages. Nearly half of all the Turkish-language tweets we collected – and a slightly smaller share of those written in Arabic – were no longer available at the end of the tracking period.
• Posted by accounts using the site’s default profile settings. More than half of tweets from accounts using the default profile image were no longer available at the end of the tracking period, as were more than a third from accounts with a default bio field. Tweets from these accounts tend to disappear because the entire account has been deleted or made private, as opposed to the individual tweet being deleted.
• Posted by unverified accounts.

We also found that removed or deleted tweets tended to come from newer accounts with relatively few followers and modest activityon the site. On average, tweets that were no longer visible on the site were posted by accounts around eight months younger than those whose tweets stayed on the site.

And when we analyzed the types of tweets that were no longer available, we found that retweets, quote tweets and original tweets did not differ much from the overall average. But replies were relatively unlikely to be removed – just 12% of replies were inaccessible at the end of our monitoring period.

Most tweets that are removed from the site tend to disappear soon after being posted. In addition to looking at how many tweets from our collection were still available at the end of our tracking period, we conducted a survival analysis to see how long these tweets tended to remain available. We found that:

• 1% of tweets are removed within one hour
• 3% within a day
• 10% within a week
• 15% within a month

Put another way: Half of tweets that are eventually removed from the platform are unavailable within the first six days of being posted. And 90% of these tweets are unavailable within 46 days.

Tweets don’t always disappear forever, though. Some 6% of the tweets we collected disappeared and then became available again at a later point. This could be due to an account going private and then returning to public status, or to the account being suspended and later reinstated. Of those “reappeared” tweets, the vast majority (90%) were still accessible on Twitter at the end of the monitoring period.

• For our analysis of news sites, we did not collect or check the functionality of internal-facing on-page links – those that point to another page on the same root domain. ↩

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How we’re implementing the National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence

The Women’s Bureau co-led the shaping of the Plan’s economic security and housing stability pillar, which aims to change harmful work cultures, address the root causes of gender-based violence in the world of work, and improve economic security for workers and survivors experiencing gender-based violence and harassment. Many of the actions outlined in this pillar drew inspiration from the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Convention on Violence and Harassment (Convention 190) . While the U.S. has not ratified Convention 190 and it is not binding on U.S. employers, it is the first international treaty to recognize the right to a world of work free of violence and harassment. 

Here are four key actions the Women’s Bureau has taken to implement the Plan:

In September 2023, the Women’s Bureau awarded the first Department of Labor grants exclusively focused on ending gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work . Over $1.5 million was awarded to five community organizations working across 14 states to build awareness of gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work, connect workers and survivors to their workplace rights and benefits, and implement worker- and survivor-driven strategies to shift workplace norms and culture. The grant program, Fostering Access, Rights and Equity (FARE), is now accepting Fiscal Year 2024 applications through May 28, 2024 .

Shortly after the Plan was released, the Women’s Bureau  signed a memorandum of understanding with the ILO Office for the U.S. and Canada to engage in joint events and activities concerning gender-based violence and harassment, including uplifting the principles of Convention 190 in U.S. policies, programs and practice. Together we are engaging stakeholders around the country and across sectors to discuss effective worker- and survivor-driven solutions to eliminate gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work. Since announcing our partnership, the Women’s Bureau has held about 40 regional convenings that have brought together workers, employers, unions, worker advocates, government representatives and others.

The Women’s Bureau also partnered with the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration on a webinar series that emphasized that gender-based violence and harassment is a workplace safety and health issue that has psychological and physical impacts on workers. The series featured discussions with workers, worker advocates, employers, and representatives from unions and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Finally, the Women's Bureau created a webpage on gender-based violence and harassment and published fact sheets, issue briefs and blogs throughout the year. Our fact sheet on gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work discusses key terminology, lists examples and outlines the key initiatives in this space. It is available in English and  Spanish . 

Carrying out the vision of the National Plan will take continued effort, action and coordination for many years to come. We all have an active role to play in making our world of work, and our society as a whole, safer and more equitable. The Women’s Bureau is committed to implementing this vision by engaging with survivors, workers, unions, employers and government agencies to address and prevent gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work. 

Amy Dalrymple and Kate Miceli are Policy Analysts at the Women’s Bureau. Katrin Schulz is the Branch Chief of Grants, Communications & Planning at the Women’s Bureau.

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Classical musicians have limited options to play professionally, so some turn to the U.S. military.

Those who emerge successfully from the audition process must then endure boot camp.

For several months, musicians train as soldiers without any access to their instruments.

Managing to secure a full-time job with a premier military band can be transformational.

Supported by

She Landed One of Music’s Great Gigs, but First Came Boot Camp

Premier military bands offer rare stability for classical musicians, who consider them a strong alternative to traditional orchestras. But signing up means shipping out.

By Sarah Diamond

Photographs by Christopher Lee

Sarah Diamond and Christopher Lee followed a military band audition in West Point, N.Y.; several days of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.; and a concert in North Salem, N.Y.

The 4,300-seat performance space about an hour north of Carnegie Hall was eerily empty, except for nine judges in uniform sitting behind a thick black curtain.

Ada Brooks, her mouth dry from nerves, lifted the bell of her euphonium, a smaller relative of the tuba, and prepared to play the notes that could determine her future.

“Breathe,” she thought. “The beginnings are the most treacherous part.”

Ms. Brooks had told herself this before. Her fervent pursuit to professionally play the euphonium, which is not used in traditional symphony orchestras, had come with many stressful auditions. This one was her 10th for the institution that calls itself the nation’s largest employer of musicians: the United States military.

Time and time again she had practiced and prepared and tried to remember to breathe. She was turned down repeatedly or offered jobs in regional bands. Now came an opportunity for a premium position, a rarely open seat in the prestigious West Point Band.

Some aspects of the audition — like playing for a jury hidden behind a curtain, to guard against potential bias — would be familiar to most orchestra musicians. Others were unique to the military. Two of the other four candidates said they had to lose weight to qualify, and the finalists were tested for coordination in marching drills.

Scores of regional military bands represent the armed forces at ceremonies, parades and holiday celebrations. About a dozen premier bands, including the U.S. Military Academy’s ensemble in West Point, N.Y., perform at inaugurations and foreign dignitary visits.

Seats in the premier bands are particularly attractive, providing job security and steady pay — the starting salary is about $70,000 — along with health care and other benefits. Those who win them tend to stay for many years, if not their entire careers.

Ms. Brooks had been practicing three hours a day in Denton, Texas, using high-end recording equipment in her living room to identify imperfections in her pitch or tempo.

At the audition, she was confident and precise while playing excerpts from works by Schoenberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich, as well as from the soundtrack of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” by John Williams.

At one point, a judge asked if she could “be more declamatory.” She repeated a few measures. After she played Boismortier’s Sonata No. 12 with the band’s principal euphonium player, Staff Sgt. Christopher Leslie, one of the judges barked: “I think you can do a better job matching his style and intonation. One more time.”

Boismortier’s Sonata No. 12

In the end, Ms. Brooks was one of two finalists asked to play additional excerpts and to sit for a face-to-face interview with the judges. The final question came from the band’s conductor, Lt. Col. Daniel Toven: Why is your dream to be in a premier military band?

Ms. Brooks paused.

“As you probably know,” she said, “euphoniums don’t have a lot of options.”

There was a burst of laughter.

After careful deliberation, Sergeant Leslie delivered the verdict. She was in.

Well, almost. Ms. Brooks had to complete more than two months of boot camp before she would become an Army musician.

A Music Mission

Ms. Brooks, 27, was introduced to the euphonium by her eighth-grade band teacher in Columbia Falls, Mont. At the time she thought it “was just a less cool tuba,” as she put it, and nobody was concerned about the limited career opportunities.

By 10th grade, she had made the all-state band and was no longer planning to study math, science or physics in college. She was now determined to play the euphonium professionally.

She spent $7,000 on a euphonium and two years at Interlochen, a performing arts high school in Michigan. Ms. Brooks then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance at the University of North Texas, where she made an eight-year commitment to the Air National Guard Band of the Southwest, eager for part-time experience playing music in a military setting.

When Ms. Brooks’s unit was deployed unexpectedly to the border of Texas and Mexico as part of Operation Lone Star , many of the musicians quit. “Our band shrunk to half of its original size,” she said.

During her 10-month deployment, Ms. Brooks worked from midnight to 8 a.m. in the armory issuing weapons. Many of her bandmates provided water to crossing migrants and sat with them until Border Patrol agents arrived. She lived in a hotel, which made it hard to prepare for auditions.

“I was practicing my instrument out in my car,” she said. “It was really miserable.”

Military life can be a shock to musicians, most of whom have no prior experience with the armed forces.

“We have to wear a combat uniform to play the tuba, it’s a little weird,” said Staff Sgt. Alec Mawrence, a tuba player in the West Point Band. “Eventually, your head is shaved and you’re screaming, ‘Yes, drill sergeant.’”

Rifles, Not Instruments

The sun had not yet risen over the Ozark Mountains in south central Missouri, but the trainees in Company B, 3rd Battalion, 10th Infantry Regiment were already marching. It was early January and cold — 1 degree — and tendrils of mist hung over the unit.

“I left my home to join the Army,” the trainees sang in unison.

“I Left My Home to Join the Army”

Ms. Brooks — now Specialist Brooks — had thought the daunting experience would be well worth it, saying earlier that “basic training is no big deal compared to 20 years of a performance job.”

But now, after six weeks at Fort Leonard Wood and with five more to go, Specialist Brooks looked exhausted. She liked morning bugle call and rifle training, especially the precision, which reminded her of practicing her instrument. Less enjoyable was standing for hours in the cold and eating abnormally fast.

“While I’m here, I practice my jodies, my marksmanship,” she said, referring to the call-and-response cadences sung while marching or running. She could not bring along her euphonium, and tried not to think about it. “It feels like a whole different life,” she said. Most of the trainees were unaware she was a musician.

A quiet perfectionist, Specialist Brooks had a hard time with the barrage of reprimands that are the hallmark of basic training. Her coping mechanism was to smile, prompting the drill sergeants to snap, “Brooks, hide your teeth!”

“I wasn’t sure how I would handle getting yelled at,” she said. “But then you realize that they’re not actually angry. They just do that all the time.”

When the company reached the armory to pick up rifles for range training, the shivering trainees stood at attention. “Soldier’s creed!” a drill sergeant shouted.

“I am an American soldier,” Specialist Brooks responded, with her unit. “I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.”

Music and the military have long been intertwined. For centuries, drums have been used to set the pace of marches. Fifes and drums were used to communicate on the battlefield before radios. The country’s first military band — the United States Marine Band , known as “the President’s Own” — was formed by an act of Congress in 1798.

Loras John Schissel, a senior musicologist at the Library of Congress, said that during the Civil War, band members would put down their instruments, take up their weapons and fight — and then resume playing. By the early 20th century, music was considered important for military morale.

“Music,” he said, came only “after food, water and ammunition.”

Direct exposure to combat has become increasingly rare for military musicians, but it is not unheard-of. In 1941, all 21 musicians aboard the battleship Arizona died in the attack on Pearl Harbor while passing ammunition to the ship’s guns. On Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Army Band helped with search and rescue at the Pentagon.

Quiet Confidence

The possibility of battle is one reason musicians get the same training as infantry soldiers. So on another freezing morning during basic training, Specialist Brooks and 136 other soldiers prepared to rappel down a 40-foot-high wooden structure known as the Confidence Tower.

During a mostly silent 1.5-mile march to the tower — talking was prohibited — the loudest noises were the crunch of frost beneath boots and the swish of camo fatigues against heavy packs.

Cut off from music in boot camp, Specialist Brooks would hum Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E-flat while running laps. Before she arrived, she transcribed song lyrics, including “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine, into her notebook so that she would have a radio in her head. While packing for a field exercise, she and her roommates sang the show tune “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.”

On the march to the Confidence Tower, a cadence Specialist Brooks had been required to yell many times was stuck in her head.

Sitting in my foxhole sharpening my knife out pops the enemy had to take his life die kill ’em die kill ’em Why won’t you die?

“I like the singing part, but the violence is a little shocking to me,” she said later.

By the time the trainees reached the tower, two had been disqualified for marching too slowly. Several others could not complete the small training wall nearby. Specialist Brooks, a rock climber and caver, was unfazed.

The wind shook the tower, and the wood creaked. As Specialist Brooks reached the top, one drill sergeant sitting near the drop-off called out to another: “You take Esophagus.” It was an affectionate nickname the instructors had given her, a play on “euphonium.”

Specialist Brooks knelt by the edge at the top of the tower. Unconcerned about hiding her teeth, she broke into a grin.

Throughout basic training, she tried not to dwell on what she was missing most from her home near Dallas: Baking her favorite blueberry muffins with chia seeds. Lingering over a cup of coffee. Watching a movie on the couch with her dog and her three cats, Kiwi, Biscuit and Momo.

When it was time for Specialist Brooks to leave Fort Leonard Wood, her boyfriend arrived with her euphonium. She played a solo even before eating her first meal off the base.

‘Tax Dollars at Work’

In April, two months after she finished boot camp, Sergeant Brooks, who was promoted to staff sergeant after graduation, was at a school in North Salem, N.Y., for her first concert as a member of the West Point Band. She had rehearsed with the group twice and was now nervously adjusting the ornate pin on the lapel of her black blazer.

“Does this look straight?” she asked. Glancing at her full concert uniform in a mirror, she said, “It’s exciting and weird to see yourself dressed like this.”

The repertoire for the concert was chosen to trace West Point’s legacy. By the time the band reached “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” the crowd was cheering and singing along.

The conductor, Colonel Toven, wrote in his master’s thesis that music helped the Army accomplish its public affairs mission of engendering trust and confidence among citizens. “These are your tax dollars at work,” he said proudly during a mid-concert speech.

After “The Official West Point March” and a rousing encore of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” Sergeant Brooks’s first concert with the band was over. She looked elated and relieved.

“The Official West Point March”

As the musicians mingled with enthusiastic audience members, Sergeant Leslie found Sergeant Brooks. “Congratulations,” he said, with a collegial nod that was far from his neutral facade as a judge at her audition eight months earlier. Sergeant Brooks, holding a bouquet of flowers, beamed.

She clutched at her collar and asked a bandmate, “Is anyone else warm in these uniforms?” As her adrenaline began to fade, she said that playing alongside these military musicians felt surreal: “It’ll take a while to get over the impostor syndrome.”

Sarah Diamond is a Times audio producer, based in New York. She also writes a biweekly column, Word Through The Times . More about Sarah Diamond

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