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Most Popular Websites Since 1993


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#1 Nitixope

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Posted 14 June 2022 - 09:07 PM

I saw this posted online tonight and thought this was pretty cool and something the Forum would appreciate. Brings back a lot of memories. I completely forgot about askJeeves.



Other than AOL, I remember CompuServe had a lot of capabilities back in the early internet days. One of my buddies found out the hard way that you could actually order airline tickets online at the time. I guess he just wanted to see what would happen. His mom was pretty upset when she got a call from the authorities, something must have tipped them off at the airline or that they were RT to Sydney. I think she just said Boys will be Boys and they all laughed it off since it was such a novelty back then not to mention pretty minor incident compared to the crazy stuff his older brother did in high school including (accidentally) totaling his moms station wagon the same day he got his drivers license.

#2 Doohickie

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 08:09 AM

I'm surprised that Twitter doesn't have more traffic.  I would have thought it was up there with Youtube and FB.

 

Also interesting how dominant Yahoo was.  I don't remember it being that big relative to other search engines.

 

RE Infoseek, I once found something useful for work while surfing at home on Infoseek.  The next day I was going to show someone but when I keyed in Infoseek I typed wrong and it redirected to a million pop-ups, none of which were anywhere near safe for work.  I told my boss about it and he kind of laughed it off.  He said if it was just one-time thing and a mistake I wouldn't get in trouble (and I didn't).


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#3 JBB

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 08:53 AM

Yahoo's popularity surged around the time that people started migrating from the original ISP brands like Prodigy, MSN, and AOL toward cable and phone provider ISPs.  The great thing about AOL in the early-2000s what their index of categorized websites.  You could look up just about any topic and find a list of websites on the subject.  I don't remember Ask being such a big deal, but apparently it was.



#4 Doohickie

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 09:47 AM

Yahoo's popularity surged around the time that people started migrating from the original ISP brands like Prodigy, MSN, and AOL toward cable and phone provider ISPs.  The great thing about AOL in the early-2000s what their index of categorized websites.  You could look up just about any topic and find a list of websites on the subject.  I don't remember Ask being such a big deal, but apparently it was.

I remember Ask rivaling Google in the early days.


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#5 gdvanc

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 10:48 AM

I'd guess for Twitter (and Instagram), use is primarily through their apps and I'm not sure that would show up in these counts. I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list but maybe a lot of their traffic is through the app as well.

 

Yahoo seemed to be the early search engine leader back when the early days of www. Other engines came and went or evolved into something else - Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Ask Jeeves (-> Ask), InfoSeek... but I think Yahoo was consistently at or near the top in visits until Google came along. I think they got themselves hooked up as the default search engine in a lot of places and are still used a lot as a start page for news for many people. They are still in the email business and picked up other companies' email accounts so people with those services probably count as a web hit when they go check their email on the web. (Old sbcglobal accounts, for instance, are hosted by Yahoo.) So they've managed to maintain some relevance outside just their search engine. Their categorizing of the web was really useful for browsing topics, but I think their approach didn't scale with the late 90s explosion of web sites. And not everything categorizes cleanly so users sometimes had to guess which path to drill into.

 

Doohickie, my oldest son came home from school with a web site school had recommended for math or some such. I mistyped the url and it popped up a picture of an unclad woman. I think my son was around 7 or 8 and his response was "wow she's a sexy girl". "Typosquatting" has been around since the early days of the web.



#6 JBB

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 10:55 AM

I am in the very slow process of migrating from my old sbcglobal email account over to a Gmail account.  My Yahoo hosted email gets hacked on a semi-regular basis and I get locked out of using it on a desktop.  Luckily, I can still use it on a phone app and I really only use it for bills and online purchasing.  Resetting the password is a nightmare of trying to navigate through a phone tree and automated system looking for someone that can actually figure out what you're trying to do.



#7 gdvanc

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 11:50 AM

Sweet wife can't remember the password to her sbcglobal email account and only has it working on her phone i think. She's worried that if her phone dies she'll lose access altogether. She tried everything she could find to recover it but so far hasn't had any luck. I created a gmail account for her years ago and I think she's been very slowly migrating things to that.



#8 JBB

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 12:34 PM

Let me see if I can track down the support number I called last time.  It was an AT&T specialist support center.



#9 gdvanc

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Posted 15 June 2022 - 12:50 PM

Thanks, JBB!






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