The Top 10 Websites in 1997 and 2007 - What's Changed?

The world has vastly changed in the last few years. It's not that the internet is a new and exciting medium. It's been around for over 20 years at this point. It's that the internet has finally begun to reach the level of saturation and practicality that everyone thought it would, a decade ago. In 1997, the promise that was the World Wide Web was so immense that crusty eyed college kids were becoming overnight millionaires for selling pet food online.

But, the internet didn't look so hot in those early days. Like any new technology, there was a growing up period that it just hadn't quite gone through yet before it could reach the level of mass media super giant that we all use so often today. In 1997, Yahoo! was flying high, Amazon was a revelation and Google sounded like a dirty word uttered by a 10 year old.

It only took a couple of years for the boom to crash, with thousands of instant millionaires becoming instantly unemployed. Being the highly reactive, impatient market that it is, the worldwide economy and a few hundred pundits immediately wrote of the technology wave as a failure. How could technology possible trump in store retail? It was going to happen anytime soon.

But, the problem wasn't that the technology wasn't going to work. It just wasn't quite developed enough yet. Internet saturation was far from complete in 1997. Broadband was just finally starting to spread off corporate and college campuses and reach the common person for an affordable price. If the early 90s were the infancy of the internet, the early 2000s were the teen years and it was only a matter of time before the internet graduated and moved out of its mom's basement. If you look at the top 10 websites from 1997 and compare them to the top 10 from this year, you'll see just how far we've come.

1997

First off, there wasn't even a practical method of measuring internet success in 1997. The internet was still a random scattering of singular web pages collected only by the static links crafted by those that maintained them. HTML was the language of choice and schools were just beginning to hire teachers that recognized the language as more than an obscure venereal disease.

In fact, with the incredibly obtuse gap in internet continuity that seems to pop up with most services and concept between 1998 and 2000, there is no current record of those top sites from 1997. However, with a little help of The Way Back Machine at Archive.org, you can find and resurrect internet pages from the infant days of the Web, including an obscure (yet at one time popular) site that tracked the top web pages in the 1990s by their daily traffic.

1. Geocities
2. Yahoo and Yahooligans, Yahoo Sports and My Yahoo
3. Starwave Corporation - Where More People Click
4. Excite, Magellan and City.Net
5. PathFinder, and Time/Warner and CNN sites: Warner Bros., HBO, DC Comics, Extra TV, Babylon5, CNN , CNN Financial Network and AllPolitics
6. AltaVista Search Engine
7. AOL Member Home Pages
8. CNET, Search.Com, News.Com and Download.com
9. The New York Times on the Web
10. Ziff Davis and HotFiles

This list, saved from June 21, 1997 displays the week's top visited sites for a little over 10 years ago. It's a telling list and for those that were online in 1997 a nostalgic one as you likely spent a great deal of your own time on many of these. Foremost, the presence of Geocities is interesting. While Geocities - which was purchased by Yahoo! only a couple of years after this list was created - is still around, it is a much less popular site than it once was.

In 1997 though, the concept of personal web pages, as see in the inclusion of AOL Member Home Pages and Yahoo's Personalized services has always been popular. The technology that allowed someone to simply input their own information and see it online was very new at the time and though the sites were often no more complicated than a few lines of text on a colored background with a few flashy graphics, it was free and it was fun. In 1997, server space and hosting plans were incredibly expensive as hard drive space was still at a premium, costing upwards of $100 a month to host your own website.

A quick run down of the rest of the sites on this list will show you that almost everything else listed is some kind of informational website. Interactivity and E-commerce had yet to fully entertain most people's internet surfing time. The internet was still a giant newspaper for most people, filled with static news and information that was slightly more accessible than the television. It was a workplace diversion, utilized during lunch breaks to check sports scores and the headlines in the newspaper.

2007

By contrast, the list of the top 10 sites from today, as gathered from Alexa on July 15, 2007, looks very similar to most people's daily internet activity.

1. Yahoo
2. Google
3. Myspace
4. Microsoft Network (MSN)
5. YouTube
6. eBay
7. Facebook
8. Windows Live
9. Craigslist
10. Wikipedia

First off, you'll notice that there are no longer any user homepage sites listed. Instead are the numerous user-created content sites. Myspace and Facebook, two of the largest and most lucrative Social Networks in the world are in the top 10 at numbers 3 and 7 and YouTube, the video giant is sitting at a strong number 5.

Windows Live offers similar features with its user-generated content pages and Wikipedia has become one of the premier resources for quick researching and gathering of information with almost 2 million articles in English alone. The search engines sit tidily at the top of the list, and of all 10 websites listed only Yahoo has remained consistent in its ranking since 1997, actually having become slightly more popular.

What Has Changed?

The question of what has changed in the last 10 years arises again and again when people start comparing the massive success of companies like Google to that of those that came before and their catastrophic collapses. The main difference between 1997 and 2007 though is that the technology has developed. Finally waking up before noon and getting out of its mother's basement is the matured and ready for work adult internet.

And with that maturity, the true value of the internet has been realized as well. Social networking and user generated content is clearly the wave of the future. It's been in the works since the early days of Geocities and simple family websites, but with dirt cheap memory costs and blazingly fast internet speeds, millions of people are online every day now, sharing their lives with the rest of the globe. Instead of a reference source, the internet has become the next generation of communication and interaction.

In 2017, it's entirely likely that we'll be looking at a brand new listing of websites once more, built on some new technology and some old. But, I remain confident that in 2017, that new listing of sites will follow a similar formula of brining the human element to the forefront of the internet. Constant integration and the ability to control and inform the general medium that is worldwide information is the future of the internet and while we can't know what that means for the future of the technology itself, we can know what we'll be doing in 10 years - updating our social networking profiles.