Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of September 10, 2022, the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 8.5 million movies, videos and TV shows, 894 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4.4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 241 thousand concerts, and over 734 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.
Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later, the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.
Friends Reunited was a portfolio of social networking websites based upon the themes of reunion with research, dating and job-hunting. The first and eponymous website was created by a husband-and-wife team in the classic back-bedroom Internet start-up; it was the first online social network to achieve prominence in Britain, and it weathered the dotcom bust.
The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.
Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the World Wide Web are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German and Japanese.
Mininova was a website offering BitTorrent downloads. Mininova was once one of the largest sites offering torrents of copyrighted material, but in November 2009, following legal action in the Dutch courts, the site operators deleted all torrent files uploaded by regular users including torrents that enabled users to download copyrighted material.
La Voz del Interior is a daily Spanish language newspaper edited and published in Córdoba, capital of the province of Córdoba, Argentina and the second-largest city in the country. The newspaper is the leading daily in Córdoba, and one of the most important in the country outside of Buenos Aires.
Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it is the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
CNET is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. CNET originally produced content for radio and television in addition to its website and now uses new media distribution methods through its Internet television network, CNET Video, and its podcast and blog networks.
YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim– in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, since which it operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
VK is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg. VK is available in multiple languages but it is predominantly used by Russian speakers. VK users can message each other publicly or privately, create groups, public pages, and events; share and tag images, audio, and video; and play browser-based games.
Truveo is a search engine for Web video, based in San Francisco and operated by Oath Inc. Truveo was founded in 2004 by Timothy Tuttle and Adam Beguelin. Truveo launched its first commercial video search service in September 2005. Truveo was acquired by AOL in January 2006. The name Truveo is a combination of the modern French verb trouver and the Latin term video.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.
Imgur is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has hosted viral images and meme, particularly those posted on Reddit.
Shockwave.com, or Shockwave, is an online and offline video games distributor and game portal. It is owned by Addicting Games, Inc., based in Los Angeles, California, United States. It was launched by Macromedia on August 2, 1999, to promote the company's Shockwave and Flash players, both used on the website. As of 2005, the website had 22 million users. By 2010, it hosted more than 400 games in a variety of genres.
Pray As You Go is a daily prayer website, podcast and application that was created in 2006 by the Jesuits in the United Kingdom. Since its founding it has been adapted into nine other languages and as of 2020, it is used 30 million times a year.
