[ih] Visualization of Internet History 1993-now

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

Looks flawed indeed.
Re: AoL I wonder if the figures are for the number of "free hours" 5 
1/4in floppies and CDs that ended up in landfill sites around the world. 
The statistics erroneously link the popularity of Web sites with the ISP 
side of the business - of course every AoL user used to have its 
starting page as an AoL page, but that does not count as a "popular" Web 
site, does it?
Same for Prodigy and Compuserve - their "web" site was their subscriber 
starting page.
Re: IMDB their site was operating from the Cardiff University Computer 
Science department, before they registered their domain name, so the 
figures might be correct.
But back then Web traffic was still minimal and the largest traffic was 
FTP, Usenet and IRC. On FTP sites, the constellation of Sun's Sunsites 
and WSMR's Simtel20 had high levels of traffic which vastly exceeded any 
Web traffic. And when the Web picked up, the largest amount of data 
traffic carried was Porn, but I guess that wouldn't be something we'd be 
proud to inscribe in history?

I also find it bizarre to see Yahoo fly forward in the early 2000s. I 
thought that Google was fast to outgrow them and that in the meantime, I 
thought automated crawlers like Lycos, Excite, Hotbot & Altavista were 
stronger? But perhaps Yahoo had better international roll-out in other 
languages...

Unfortunately, as with much of the data about the Internet in the 1990s 
and early 2000s, things happened so fast and in so many places that I 
doubt that anyone will be able to agree to a single dataset. At some 
point, I'd argue that "we" lost track and ended up making estimates with 
varying levels of guesswork.

Kindest regards,

Olivier

On 23/01/2021 22:58, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Er, hum, excuse me, for January 1993 it shows AOL as having 20 million of something. http://info.cern.ch was almost certainly still the leading site then, and there were only about 50 sites in total, mainly in academia. AOL was widely sneered at for *not* being an ISP. Anyway, aol.com wasn't registered until 1995-06-22.
>
> prodigy.com was registered 1992-09-16, but according to Wikipedia:
> "In 1994, Prodigy became the first of the early-generation dialup services to offer full access to the World Wide Web and to offer Web page hosting to its members. Since Prodigy was not a true Internet service provider, programs that needed an Internet connection, such as Internet Explorer and Quake multiplayer, could not be used with the service."
>
> compuserve.com was registered 1988-10-06. I have no idea when they first had an HTTP server, but they really didn't have proper Internet connectivity even in late 1995. They did start sending somebody (Rich Petke) to the IETF during 1995.
> (I'm looking at an email from Barry F. Berkov <bfb at csi.compuserve.com> dated 21 Oct 95 10:56:43 EDT.)
>
> The graphic also shows imdb having 21,261 of something in January 1993. imdb.com was registered on 1996-01-05. mtv.com was registered on 1995-02-14. bloomberg.com on 1993-09-29.
>
> So at least for 1993-4, it seems that the numbers are rubbish.
>
> Regards
>     Brian Carpenter
>
> On 24-Jan-21 09:19, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> FYI, I stumbled across an interesting dynamic graphic, visualizing the
>> top Internet sites over time.   Fascinating to see the shifts as the
>> Internet evolved, so might be of interest to Internet Historians.  See:
>>
>> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-popular-websites-since-1993/
>>