The 50 Most Important Websites of All Time (2024)

December 20, 1990 didn’t feel historic at the time, but it was the day a British computer scientist in the Swiss Alps published the first-ever website at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

From his NeXT computer, Tim Berners-Lee published, appropriately enough, a primer on the web, explaining the concept of hypertext and describing how to set up a server.

But Berners-Lee didn’t share the site with the public until a year later, when he told his friends in the alt.hypertext newsgroup about his creation. It would take another couple of years and the arrival of the first “killer app”—the browser Mosaic—for the web to catch on.

In 2013, to mark the 20th anniversary of making the web available to anyone, CERN recreated the original website in all of its black, white, and blue glory.

If, like so many other Americans, you eventually relented to the onslaught of America Online CDs arriving in the mail, AOL.com served as your introduction to the web. After the whirring and beeping of your dial-up modem mercifully ended, you were greeted with a one-stop-shop that let you browse headlines, read horoscopes, and check your “mail.” It was magic.

But by the mid 2000s, after AOL’s disastrous merger with Time Warner, AOL.com had become a relic. With a decade of experience, web users had grown savvier and less reliant on portals to find their way to the content they wanted.

So AOL.com adapted, hoping to keep people hooked on the portal by offering access to non-AOL emails and allowing users to post to social media from the homepage. It didn’t make much of a difference.

Jeff Bezos knew he wanted to start an e-commerce business before he knew what he wanted to sell. After researching the biggest mail-order businesses in the country, he settled on books, a product with too much variety for any store to completely stock and a decentralized power structure.

By 1996, Amazon was making millions selling books through its straightforward website that offered some of the same services it does today: reviews, recommendations, and a vast inventory.

Before long, Amazon had expanded to music, movies, clothing, household items, and ultimately everything else on the planet. And as Amazon the company branched off into web hosting, hardware, and robotics, Amazon.com has evolved to consume a bigger and bigger chunk of e-commerce. In 2018, the retail giant accounted for 37 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spent online.

Urban legends used to spread slowly and by word of mouth, until months after the rumor began, the whole country believed Bubble Yum was made of spider legs. Had Snopes been around in the mid ’70s, the internet’s go-to home for debunking hoaxes could have knocked down that one, as it has thousands of others over the years. Instead, the Life Saver Co. took out full-page newspaper ad to set the record straight. Snopes has a page on it, too, just in case.

Snopes launched in 1994, just as email forwards and message boards become the preferred method for spreading unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories. The site excelled at debunking the type of nonsense that the mainstream media ignored. (No, moviegoers were not getting jabbed with HIV-infected needles in 1998.)

The attacks on September 11, 2001 parked a new era of conspiracy theories, and Snopes was there to separate fact from fiction. Another key date: November 8, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Suddenly, political hoaxes and deliberate misinformation were everywhere, helped along by the rise of social media. Now, a quarter-century after Snopes’ founding, the U.S. has entered a post-truth era. Snopes is no longer the only website dedicated to debunking deception, but it’s still the biggest.

When Yahoo launched in 1994, it wasn’t called Yahoo, and it wasn’t a search engine. “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was a web directory maintained by hand that provided links to a much smaller internet than we have today. Major changes came within a year. Jerry (Yang) and David (Filo) changed the site’s name to Yahoo, and introduced a tool allowing users to search the directory. By 1998, Yahoo.com ruled the web, with close to 100 million page views a day.

Many acquisitions followed over the years, with Yahoo buying GeoCities, Broadcast.com, Tumblr, and others. Few were successes. And while Yahoo’s business fortunes have sometimes suffered, Yahoo.com remains one of the most popular websites on the internet.

Maybe the portal model is dead. But if it’s combined with a competent search engine and a popular email service, maybe it can live forever.

In December 1994, a somewhat cryptic message began landing in email inboxes. “There is a postcard waiting for you at the Post (card) Office,” it began. The email directed recipients to a webpage created by Judith Donath at MIT’s Media Lab and provided them with a claim number. Upon entering the number on the site, they were shown a card created for them, complete with a slow-loading image and a personalized message. The e-card was born.

Donath’s site exploded in popularity by the next Christmas, and an entire e-card industry soon followed. By 1999, the website for Blue Mountain Arts Publishing Company, a paper greeting card company, sold for $780 million.

The year before, it was the ninth most popular website on the internet. The e-card faded for a decade, only for the New York Times to tout its resurgence in 2006. Here’s to the next comeback.

Not long after it launched with money from Apple and Adobe Ventures, Salon was mentioned in a feature published in the American Journalism Review as “a classy cyberspace magazine.” Founder David Talbot said he hoped to compete with highbrow glossies such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. A decade later, he seemed to have succeeded.

By the mid-aughts, Salon was struggling to remain profitable, but it had also developed a reputation as a punchy source of media gossip, political opinion, and must-read sex columns. Along the way, it continued to discover writers who would go on to prominence.

In the decade and a half since, its star has faded, with some of the original editors publicly criticizing an approach that sometimes seen as too stridently left-wing. But, as the writers of a 2016 Politico piece entitled “The fall of Salon.com” noted, “people have predicted Salon’s collapse almost since it launched.” It hasn’t happened yet.

In the early days, Pierre Omidyar’s Auction Web, the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, shared a domain with a page for Tufts University alumni and another full of information on ebola.

Over the next three years, only one of those passions would prove to be a billion-dollar business, and by 1998, Auction Web rebranded as eBay, Meg Whitman was named CEO, and Beanie Baby mania propelled eBay into the stratosphere.

After surviving the first dotcom bubble burst, eBay continued growing into one of the internet’s biggest e-commerce engines. It bought PayPal in 2002 and soon began showing up IRL, with stores such as QuikOrder offering to sell your stuff on eBay for a small fee.

Whether it was a hard-to-find car part, a coveted Christmas gift, or a half-eaten plate of French toast left behind by Justin Timberlake, eBay was the place to get it. Though eBay’s presence has faded some, and it’s currently struggling through a restructuring, its influence is evident today in some of the biggest online platforms.

In the first big interview that Match.com founder Gary Kremen did to promote his upstart dating site, he made a rather confident prediction: “Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ.” Nearly 25 years later, the quote is still sorta crazy…but not completely so.

Match.com is now a part of IAC’s Match Group, which also owns online dating giants Tinder and OkCupid. Together, they dominate a space that has come a long way since Match.com created it.

In the late 1990s, people widely considered online dating a playground for the socially inept or the aggressively horny. In the decade since, it’s become universally accepted and spawned bizarrely specific sites to meet a mate. Now, 40 percent of couples say they met online.

Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman once said they planned to run Suck.com for a few years and then shut it down. But the site, one of the earliest sources of critical, sometimes caustic commentary of the web, politics, and pop culture, was too good to die at such a young age.

Three months after Suck launched, Wired bought it, giving Anuff and Steadman more time to work on the site and a budget to do it.

Suck would go on to establish itself as highly influential web magazine, building an audience through daily content that helped establish the wry, often cynical voice that would come to define blogging.

And though the technology wasn’t innovative—the site consisted of a single center-aligned column of text and a few cartoons—the way it was used could be. Among its many legacies is using a link to point to a joke.

Craig Newmark didn’t start his “list” to help people find jobs, sell couches, or get laid. The San Francisco transplant was simply trying to share Bay Area event listings in an email newsletter. As his newsletter’s popularity grew, so did the demand for a website.

In 1996, craigslist.org went live. Over the next couple decades, Craigslist expanded to cities across the world, took in over a billion dollars in revenue, and made Newmark a very wealthy man.

But Craigslist’s success left casualties in its wake. The website has been credited with accelerating the death of the newspaper by siphoning off classified revenue and blamed for allowing scams, hate, and abuse. It’s also done no favors for art of web design.

By 2019, though, Newmark had spent years using his wealth to make amends for knee-capping journalism, and the site’s anachronistic design is a reprieve from the rest of the web. It’s also still pretty useful.

Hotmail (originally stylized as HoTMaiL as a riff on HTML) launched at a time when most people didn’t use email, and those who did accessed it at work or via clunky mailboxes tied to their ISP. That changed with the introduction of free, ad-supported webmail that could be opened through any browser.

Hotmail wasn’t the only company offering the service, but it quickly became the biggest, thanks to a viral marketing scheme that’s become something of Silicon Valley legend.

The trick was simple: Every email sent from a Hotmail address would have a signature imploring the person reading to “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” Within a year of launching, Hotmail had millions of subscribers, and in late 1997, Microsoft came calling.

Around the same time, Yahoo snatched up RocketMail and introduced its own free webmail client. Both Yahoo and Outlook (Microsoft’s rechristening of Hotmail) remain popular email providers, but neither was able to keep pace with Google’s Gmail, which arrived in 2004 and has ruled the category ever since.

One of the web’s first viral memes, Hamster Dance was the result of a friendly competition. Deidre LaCarte, her sister, and a friend set out to see who could create a website that got the most traffic.

LaCarte built a page of dancing hamsters on Geocities that racked up millions of hits, received writeups in mainstream press, and signaled the web’s coming obsessions with the silly, fuzzy, and ephemeral. Obviously, she won.

Hamster Dance lived on Geocities, the DIY web hosting service where users, or homesteaders, built pages in virtual communities such as Area51 (conspiracy theories) and Motor City (gear heads).

A social network before social networks, Geocities was also a blogging platform before blogs, and a place that encouraged users to reverse the flow of online information; they weren’t just taking things from the internet, they were putting things onto it. Then Yahoo bought Geocities in 1999 and it died a slow, painful death.

WhiteHouse.com never attracted millions of visitors. It never made anyone rich. But it did teach countless young web surfers an enduring lesson about web domains. The site’s owner first filled it with political satire, hoping to draw an audience of people who thought they were going to the official White House website (then, as now, WhiteHouse.gov.).

When parody didn’t draw, Parisi turned to p*rn, posting images such as “a likeness of Hillary Clinton (decked out in leather and brandishing a whip) leading around a likeness of the president (sporting a leather collar).”

In 1997, the site caught the attention of the actual White House, which sent a cease and desist letter. The owner did neither, and Americans continued to learned the difference between .com (for commercial domains) and .gov (for government domains) in a very explicit way.

The only person more responsible for The Drudge Report than Matt Drudge himself may be the news aggregation god’s dad. In 1994, Robert Druge bought his somewhat aimless son a Packard Bell computer. Within a year, the younger Drudge was sending friends a gossip-filled email newsletter that poked fun at Hollywood and D.C.

In 1996, he put the Drudge Report online and landed his first big scoop: Bob Dole had chosen Jack Kemp as his running mate in the 1996 presidential race.

The Drudge Report cemented its place in the history books when it published a scoop of a scoop, reporting in January 1998 that Newsweek was sitting on a story about Bill Clinton’s relationship with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Before long, the site was the web’s most important news aggregator and an agenda -etting force in conservative politics, maintaining the same beginner’s HTML design through it all.

Matt Drudge’s influence on online conservative media is hard to overstate. He discovered Andrew Breitbart, propped up Alex Jones, and has for years served as the assignment editor for the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Ben Shapiros of the world.

George Ouzounian, writing under the pseudonym Maddox, launched his humbly-named website after posting a list of 50 things that “pissed me off” to a message board for coders. “They liked it, so I posted my first page back in ‘97,” he wrote on the site’s FAQ.

Maddox built his audience with scathing takedowns of those who probably deserved it (“Bill O’Reilly is a big blubbering vagin*”) and those who didn’t (“Garfield sucks”), always with a hypermasculine irreverence (“How to kill yourself like a man”).

In 2006, Ouzounian turned his site into a book that rocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list before it was even out. But not everyone was a fan. Reviews called Ouzounian a misogynist, an avatar of “toxic masculinity” before the phrase existed.

Ouzounian doesn’t update his site much anymore (two posts in 2019, two in 2018, and one in 2017), but he does make YouTube videos, where his now-popular brand of offend-everyone humor lives on.

Before goats*e, before Lemon Party, before Tubgirl, and before “2 Girls 1 Cup,” the original purveyor of internet sickout culture was Rotten.com, an aggregation site for the worst of the web. According to its “about” page, Rotten was founded as a reaction to the Communications Decency Act, which passed in 1996 and marked Congress’s first attempt to regulate speech on the internet.

“[O]ur mission is to actively demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong,” said the site that regularly posted pictures of botched executions and medical curiosities.

This mission continued even after the Supreme Court struck down the CDA, and in 1997, Rotten went mainstream after posting doctored photos that purported to show Princess Diana after her death. Soon, Rotten was a must-see for anyone who wanted to know what a body looked like after getting hit by a train.

For many young web users, the ability to stomach Rotten was a point of pride, a signal that you, unlike the old people who didn’t know how to use a mouse, weren’t naive to the realities of the real world—even if they weren’t always real.

The late ‘90s were a time when, as Slashdot founder Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, once put it, “the plumbers of the internet had the power.” That’s how a community like his—tagline: “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”—could become an internet sensation.

With a daily dose of handpicked science and tech stories, Slashdot became required reading for a generation of geeks who were genuinely excited about open source software.

The site’s popularity led to the “Slashdot effect,” or the phenomenon of sending so much traffic to another site that it would collapse under the weight of the clicks. Those clicks were coming from an engaged group of users who built one of the web’s most vital communities on Slashdot.

People didn’t just go to Slashdot to read the news—they went there to discuss it and to understand it. And then they started going elsewhere.

The idea that became Google owes a debt to academic publishing, where frequent citations are the surest sign of a paper’s importance. Larry Page applied the same logic to webpages for his Stanford dissertation, and with the help of his math whiz friend Sergey Brin, invented a product that consistently bested the most popular search engines of the day.

Originally called BackRub, the search engine was renamed Google in 1996. Two years later, it was winning converts from the cluttered portals that ruled the day.

Google the company grew into a behemoth of online advertising, cloud computing, and wind turbines, but Google.com hasn’t changed all that much.

The stark, white homepage, designed so simply because Brin didn’t know HTML, was so out of place among the flashing word art and dancing babies of the late ‘90s that some users sat staring at it, waiting for the rest of the page to load before trying to search. Now, with 63,000 searches a second, Google doesn’t have that problem.

Sarah Bunting and Tara Ariano just wanted to make fun of Dawson’s Creek when they started their TV recap blog in 1998. Their work proved popular, though, and by 2002, DawsonsWrap, briefly rebranded as Mighty Big TV, became Television Without Pity. The site’s scope expanded to dozens of shows, and Hollywood started paying attention.

TWoP’s style of TV recaps, rich in detail and impossibly snarky, soon spread to nearly every corner of the internet. It wasn’t just the format that proved influential; it was the approach. The site was one of the first to take TV seriously, even if it made fun of nearly every show it covered.

In 2007, NBCUniversal bought Television Without Pity as the TV recap economy blossomed along with the Golden Age of Television. Much like Peak TV, though, the site couldn’t last.