15 MOST INFLUENTIAL WEBSITES

By: Dream Catcher

1. GOOGLE
Since its arrival in 1998, Google has become so ingrained in our vernacular that Merriam Webster added it to
the dictionary as a transitive verb. The multinational tech firm has become synonymous with the notion of
researching anything — you don’t “look something up online,” you “Google” it. And it remains the web’s
most pervasive search tool.
2. AMAZON
Amazon in 2017 is a retail and technology behemoth, selling everything from salad dressing to server space.
But it began as a humble online bookseller, paving the way for all the e-commerce sites that followed. The
company may not have pioneered concepts like Google browsing a digital “store” or filling up an online
“shopping cart,” but the site helped e-tail break into the mainstream, and at a time when many consumers
weren’t comfortable plugging credit card numbers into browsers.
3. WIKIPEDIA
While your high school teachers and college professors may have taught you to doubt Wikipedia’s reliability,
its rise to prominence since launching in 2001 is undeniable. With five million English entries, Wikipedia has
become the de facto Internet encyclopedia. That said, Wikipedia’s openness — arguably what’s fueled its
omnipresence — is also its biggest handicap. Since Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet
access, the platform is susceptible to bias or outright inaccuracy.
4. FACEBOOK
A website founded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the early 2000s as a way to profile Harvard classmates has
become the world’s largest social network. More than two billion users frequent the platform monthly. But the
site has also evolved from a way to stay in touch with friends and relatives, to a medium through which both
news and propaganda flow freely, mingling in ways that often make it difficult to tell one from the other.
Facebook has pledged to do battle with so-called “fake news,” and says it’s refining the site’s processes to
mitigate the spread of misinformation as well as click bait.
5. YOUTUBE
In retrospect, watching videos on the Internet seems obvious — monitors are basically tiny flatscreen TVs,
after all. But it took YouTube to show the world that anyone could be a video star. Just as early blogging
platforms made everyone a critic, YouTube turned anyone with a smartphone into a video publisher. YouTube
makes it easy to entertain ourselves, learn new skills or keep in touch with far-flung friends.
6. CRAIGSLIST
Long before finding a date by swiping your smartphone, browsing apartments on Trulia, or searching for part-
time work through Indeed, there was Craigslist. The site remains a popular destination for real estate and job
listings in 2017, with more than 60 million monthly U.S. users. Craigslist started as an emailed list of San
Francisco-based events in 1995, which founder Craig Newmark expanded into a classified ads site and online
forum. Its influences extend beyond the web, too: many attribute a significant part of the newspaper industry’s
decline to the shift from print ads to online ones.
7. YAHOO
Years before “Google” became a verb, there was Yahoo. An early effort to bring order to the chaos of the
Internet, Yahoo served as a sort of Yellow Pages for the web, with human editors selecting links to news
stories and other sites. But Yahoo’s core idea — that something should help Internet users cut through all the
noise to find a bit of signal — remains an essential tenet of online information curation.
8. DRUDGE REPORT
Matt Drudge’s eponymous “Report” is most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, but the site
rarely posts news of its own. Instead, it serves as a conservative-leaning news aggregator, pointing to articles
from across the web and putting an ideologically-spun headline on them. Drudge’s barebones web design has
changed little over the years, serving as a sort of living memorial to the days of dial-up Internet. But the site
remains massively influential in Washington, D.C., influencing the agenda of Beltway movers and shakers.
9. eBay
Amazon may run the world’s biggest online store today, but credit eBay for popularizing the idea of an open
marketplace for buyers and sellers. eBay, which began life in 1995 as AuctionWeb, forever altered the way the
world passed along and monetized used goods. And it paved the way for modern e-tailers like Etsy, which lets
anyone sell their crafts or run a small business online. Amazon may be where we turn for paper towels,
groceries and last minute holiday gifts, but it’s still eBay people scan to find vintage or scarce items, from rare
pairs of sneakers to sold out iPhones.
10. INFO(dot)CERN(dot)CH
Created by “father of the web” Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN research center in Switzerland,
info.cern.ch isn’t much to look at today. But the archetype for anything is influential by default, and that’s
certainly true of this, the spark for every website that followed. Still viewable today, the site spotlights features
in the DNA of every modern website, including hyperlinks, a site map, an About-style page and contact
information. We’ve made order of magnitude changes to the audiovisual aspects of web design since, but
Berners-Lee’s basic thoughts on what a website should be still resonate nearly 30 years later.
11. THE PIRATE BAY
Open platforms invite controversy by their nature, giving voice to groups who want to challenge cultural or
legal principles. Sites like Napster kickstarted illicit music-sharing in the early 2000s, but The Pirate Bay,
launched by a trio of Swedes in 2003, exemplifies the anti-copyright argument that “information wants to be
free.” The site indexes content hosted by others, providing links that its users can use to download movies,
music, books and more — often in flagrant violation of information-sharing laws. The site somehow persists
and remains a flashpoint for debate over the virtues and perils of peer-to-peer file sharing.
12. WIKILEAKS
A site once contrasted with The Pentagon Papers for its subversive “document dumps” of classified
information has in the wake of the 2016 election become a battleground for debate about the role of mass scale
whistleblowing and propaganda. Established in 2006 by Australian activist Julian Assange as a means to
anonymously divulge sensitive information about countries and institutions, Wikileaks was best known for its
revelations about U.S. military operations, diplomatic activities, detention camps and abetting of NSA leaker
Edward Snowden — until 2016, when the site involved itself in the U.S. presidential election by releasing
troves of Democratic party emails allegedly supplied by Russian operatives.
13. PANDORA
Early Internet sites like MP3(dot)com kicked off a music-sharing wave that’s culminated in digital platforms
like iTunes and Spotify, but Pandora exemplifies the notion of online streamed tunes with recommendations
delivered to taste. Launched in 2000, Pandora let users play songs they knew or from genre categories in a
browser, then followed with suggested songs based on shared traits. You can see elements of that process in
everything from Amazon’s “New For You” product recommendations, to Apple’s “For You” iTunes content
curation tab.
14. REDDIT
Online forums have been around since the Internet’s inception, so in that sense, Reddit’s just the modern face
of what began as dial-up discussion boards. But Reddit, which arrived in 2005, also folds in social news
curation, making it a combination story-and-reaction hub. That notion of melding interesting, obscure or hot
button topics with fan communities has proven so popular that it’s lured hundreds of millions of users who
generate tens of billions of page views annually, giving rise to a site slogan that plausibly reads “The front
page of the internet.”
15. MATCH(dot)COM
The latter’s been around since 1995, an online dating service whose inception in 1993 was originally to
distribute online classified ads for newspapers. But that quickly shifted to helping people make screened and
interests-matched interpersonal connections, culminating in a service that today operates in 25 countries and
boasts tens of millions of members.

So, which website do you want to visit? Search it through —read number one—.

"A dream catcher works if your dream is to be gained."

–Dieu Nous Benisse–

Sources: Wikipedia and 9x(dot)com