1. AOL
AOL LLC (formerly America Online) is an American global Internet services and media company operated by Time Warner. It is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York, NY. Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services. AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called "AOL", that allowed millions of customers around the world to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole. At its zenith, AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide, most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite. AOL was rated both one of the best and worst Internet suppliers in the UK, according to a poll by BBC Watchdog. On March 31, 1997, the short lived eWorld was purchased by AOL, forcing the 115,000 users to subscribe to AOL. The ISP side of AOL UK was bought by The Carphone Warehouse in October 2006 to take advantage of their 100,000 LLU customers which made The Carphone Warehouse the biggest LLU provider in the UK.
AOL.com (Snapshot of website on 20th December 1996)
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2. Ask Jeeves
Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom) is a search engine started in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors. Ask.com is currently owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp under the NASDAQ symbol IACI.
ask.com (Snapshot of website on 3rd December 1998)
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3. BBC Online
BBC Online (located at the URL bbc.co.uk) is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize. The BBC has had an online presence supporting its TV and radio programmes and web only initiatives since 1994 but didn't launch officially until December 1997, following government approval to fund it by TV licence fee revenue as a service in its own right. Throughout its short history, the online plans of the BBC have been subject to various public consultations and government reviews illustrating concerns from commercial rivals that its large presence and public funding distorts the UK market.
The website has gone through several branding changes since it was launched. Originally named BBC Online, it was then rebranded as BBCi (which itself was the brand name for interactive TV services) before being named bbc.co.uk. It was then branded BBC Online again in 2008.The Web-based service of the BBC is one of the world's largest and most visited websites (forty-seventh most visited according to Alexa on 31 March 2009) . As of 2007, it contained over two million pages.
bbc.co.uk in (Snapshot of website on 28th April 1997)
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4. Blogger
Blogger is a blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. The service itself is located at www.blogger.com, and blogs that do not publish to their own websites are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com.
Blooger.com (Snapshot of website on 12th October 1999)
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5. Cnn
Cable News Network, almost always referred to by its initialism CNN, is a major U.S. cable news network founded in 1980 by Ted Turner.Upon its launch, CNN was the first station to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television network in the United States. While the news network has numerous affiliates, CNN primarily broadcasts from its headquarters at the CNN Center in Atlanta, the Time Warner Center in New York City, and studios in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. CNN is owned by parent company Time Warner, and the U.S. news network is a division of the Turner Broadcasting System.
CNN is sometimes referred to as CNN/U.S. to distinguish the North American channel from its international counterpart, CNN International. Its news gathering resources are second only to Britain's BBC News in the number of employed news journalists and worldwide news bureaus. As of June 2008, CNN is available in over 93 million U.S. households. Broadcast coverage extends to over 890,000 American hotel rooms, and the U.S broadcast is also shown in Canada. Globally, CNN programming airs through CNN International, which can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories
cnn.com (Snapshot of website on 20th June 2000)
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6.Digg
Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems.
digg.com (Snapshot of website on 11th November 1998)
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7. Facebook
Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 200 million active users worldwide.
facebook.com (Snapshot of website on 12th December 1998)
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8. Flickr
Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of November 2008[update], it claims to host more than 3 billion images.
Flickr.com (Snapshot of website on 26th February 2004)
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9.Google
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company has 20,164 full-time employees.
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company was being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work and as the most powerful brand in the world, according to Millward Brown.
google.com (Snapshot of website on 11th November 1998)
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10. IMDb (Internet Movie Database)
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, video games, and most recently, fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. IMDb launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com.
The IMDb website consists of one of the largest accumulations of data about films, television programs, direct-to-video products, and video games, reaching back to each medium's respective beginning. In many cases, the information goes beyond simple title and crew credits, but also includes data on uncredited personnel, production and distribution companies, plot summaries, memorable quotes, awards, reviews, box office performance, filming locations, technical specs, promotional content, trivia, and links to official and other websites. Furthermore, the IMDb tracks titles in production, including major announced projects still in development.
IMDb has 57 million visitors, 17 million of which are registered.
IMDb.com (Snapshot of website on 19th November 1996)
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11. Myspace
MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News Corporation, which has its headquarters in New York City. In June 2006, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the United States.According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by main competitor Facebook in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 6, 2006 in the Netherlands and the site counted approximately 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006
Myspace.com (Snapshot of website on 17th January1997)
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12. Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKEX: 4338) is an American-based multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices.Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its most profitable products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.
Originally founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Windows line of operating systems. Its products have all achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. One commentator notes that Microsoft's original mission was "a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse as well as home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and MSN TV. The company's initial public stock offering (IPO) was in 1986; the ensuing rise of the company's stock price has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.
Microsoft.com (Snapshot of website on 20th October 1996)
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13. Rapidshare
RapidShare is a German-owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with certain restrictions and limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. Rapidshare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is currently the 17th most visited website globally.
Rapidshare.com (Snapshot of website on 20th July 2006)
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14.Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.8 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.
wikipedia.org (Snapshot of website on 27th July 2001)
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15. Windows Live
Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are applications that need installing as well. There are three ways in which Windows Live services are offered: Windows Live Essentials applications, web services, and mobile services.
Windows Live was first announced on November 1, 2005. In its initial release, several Windows Live properties were rebranded and enhanced from Microsoft's MSN set of products and services. However, MSN still exists alongside Windows Live as a means of delivering programmed content (as opposed to customized content and communications). Although the new branding might suggest closer technical ties to the Microsoft Windows operating system and services, the two are available separately. Microsoft said that Windows Live "is a way to extend the Windows user experience". Windows Vista provides a link in its user interface to download Windows Live Messenger, and Windows 7 will see the removal of applications such as Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker and replaced with the Windows Live Essentials suite, a software that allows the downloading and installation of similar offerings from Windows Live. Some web-based Windows Live services such as Windows Live SkyDrive are available outside of Windows, however these services are integrated closely with the Windows Live Essentials suite of applications.
live.com (Snapshot of website on 11th February 1998)
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16 Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and social media websites and services. Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.
On January 13, 2009, Yahoo appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore, Alexa Internet, Netcraft, and Nielsen Ratings), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008. The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007. It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and in the world.
Yahoo.com (Snapshot of website on 17th October 1996)
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17. Youtube
YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google.
The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS and the BBC and other organizations offer some of their material via the site.
Youtube.com (Snapshot of website on 28th April 2005)
