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Top 10 Web sites 10 years later
SitePoint recently took a look at the top 10 Web sites from ten years ago. They did not post screen shots so I jumped over to the Wayback Machine to see what the sites looked like back then.
Not surprisingly, search portals dominate the list. So do 216 color schemes with few pictures that take up a very small part of a browser. Pixel-y gifs were the way to go back then when modems downloaded the Internets at a blazing 14.4, 28.8 or 56k if you were particularly lucky.
Click on each image for a bigger view.
1. America Online
The once mighty AOL’s main page looks a lot like Yahoo’s does now. And look! AOL in early 1998 offered a 50-hour free trial. Long gone are time caps, but bandwidth caps may be on the way.
2. Yahoo
The Yahoo of 1998 was quite the portal … Like other search sites of that era, it emphasized itself as a directory of information, putting Web sites into categories on its main page. There weren’t any front page ads, but the owners were still racking in the dough, both through venture capital and a blazing-hot tech stock market.
2008 Yahoo news dominates many regular news Web sites.
3. Microsoft
Microsoft’s front page was quite spartan, and even more so in these pics, because the graphics aren’t downloading from the Wayback Machine.
Take a look at that middle panel. The Clinton administration spent much of the 1990s going after Microsoft for antitrust violations. Here’s Microsoft’s spin.
How was Microsoft No. 3 in 1998? Yikes. I guess due to the high volume of Windows PCs combined with the need for support and downloads.
4. Excite
Present-day Excite looks very similar to the Excite of 1998. Color scheme and logo remain the same. It became another causality of the .com collapse.
5. Geocities
(No picture. Wayback Machine isn’t playing nice with Geocities)
Before Blogger, Xanga and Myspace, there was Geocities. With a Geocities account you could build a Web site home in various neighborhoods, like Hollywood for movies or Silicon Valley for tech.
I remember teaching myself very simple Web design with Geocities’ WYSIWYG editor during those wild and rough days of the early Web. Remnants of Geocties pop up all the time when I fact check articles at work. In fact, sadly, a few legitimate companies still use the Geocities pages they created back in 1996.
6. Netscape
“Net…what?” you say, you young whippersnapper.
Before Microsoft cornered the browser market with its anticompetitive bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, Netscape actually held nearly 90 percent of the pie. Bill Gates struck back, though, and Internet Explorer’s share swelled.
AOL bought Netscape in 1998, and Netscape spawned Mozilla. Mozilla still carries the Netscape torch in the form of Firefox.
Meanwhile, Netscape’s share deteriorated more under AOL. AOL tried to revive Netscape’s portal as a Digg clone and ultimately the old browser and company were put out of their misery earlier this year.
For fun, here is an archive of every Web browser released.
7. Lycos
Yet another search portal. If in 1998, you heard yourself saying, “Another darn portal?!”, then your 2008 equivalent might be, “Another social networking site?!”
8. The Whowhere Network
Huh? I use AnyWho.
9. Disney
Although the formula remains the same, Disney.com 2008 is a heckuva a lot more sophisticated.
10. Infoseek
Another search engine and a reminder of a service I used a lot in the late 1990s: Mama.com, a search engine aggregator.
Elsewhere:
Forbes looks at where we spend our time online now.