Initial Look Of The Biggest Websites

Since the rise of the Internet in the ’90s, the web has shown no signs of slowing down. We’ve watched the birth and evolution of social media, e-commerce and online video entertainment. It’s hard to imagine that the treasured websites we all use today were at one point just scribbles on a piece of paper, or the brainchild of a 19-year-old college student. With the help of the Wayback Machine, which provides screenshots of any website imaginable from its inception until now, we’re can view the original designs and content of the most visited websites in the U.S. Seeing how far the world has come in terms of web design, where do you foresee us heading next?

1. Google - Google began in March 1998 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies.

2. YouTube - YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The choice of the name "www.youtube.com " led to problems for a similarly named website, "www.utube.com". The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to "www.utubeonline.com". In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006

3. Facebook - Facebook is a social networking service which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students. and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of September 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users and has a revenue of $4,270 Million . Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.
4. Yahoo -In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they created a website named "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".

5.Twitter - Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet.

6. Amazon - Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994, and the site went online in 1995.It is named after the Amazon River, one of the largest rivers in the world. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys.

Sources - Mashable | Wikipedia 

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