World Wide Web Day Is Here. What Are The Most Important Websites We Know?
Yesterday was our professional holiday — World Wide Web Day. Bet you didn’t even know the day existed, but we did. And while celebrating working we started thinking about what websites are so essential that the web wouldn’t be the same without them. What are the most important websites we all rely on? We all have different answers to that one, but let’s try and stay objective.
YouTube
Sure, it’s “just” the biggest entertainment website on the web, but it’s also more important than that. The internet has always been the place for creative people, but before YouTube, you also had to be tech-savvy to share your creations with the world. But now, it became as easy as clicking the “Upload” button. YouTube has become the most important creative hub for the whole planet, and it’s as important in 2022.
While YouTube was genuinely innovative, Google’s idea wasn’t new — search engines were pretty widespread in 1998 when the famous multi-colored logo first appeared. Still, Google turned out to be much better than its more experienced alternatives. And in 2022, it’s more than a search engine — it’s a tech behemoth releasing laptops and phones, and it pretty much controls the internet by this point. The funny thing is, it’s not that good a search engine nowadays.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is what the internet should be all about — freely available and censorship-free information. Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has become one of the most respected online resources. Is it as unreliable as your professors would let you believe? No, but still, don’t trust everything you read on there.
Amazon
Amazon is an eCommerce behemoth, and it revolutionized not only the way you can do business on the web but the whole world of physical commerce as well. It wasn’t innovative, but it was the one website to make people believe shopping online was as normal as going to the mall. And where are the malls now?
Internet Archive
The internet is a place with a limitless amount of information, but one bad thing about it is that there’s no real way of archiving the data. Go to Wikipedia, and you’ll learn that more than half of the reference links are long dead. That’s where Internet Archive comes in handy: since 1996, it’s been archiving the web, ensuring no piece of information gets lost to time.