The A2Hosting.com team looked at available historical data through the years to create a visualization of the most visited websites in the world since 1995. See how the top websites in the world have changed through the years.

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In 1995, the top websites by total global visits were AOL, Yahoo!, GeoCities, Netscape, and WebCrawler. 

In June of 1995, AOL was at the top of the World Wide Web game. AOL was created in 1983, but truly became an internet phenomenon in the 1990s. It originally provided dial-up internet service to people around the world, and became known for its themed chat rooms and being one of the leading instant messaging services. While AOL.com still does exist today, it is not the powerhouse that it was at its peak as one of the most famous 90s websites.

Yahoo! was the second most popular website in 1995. Yahoo! was created in 1994 by two Stanford University students. The Yahoo.com domain was purchased in 1995. It originally started out as a web directory and later pivoted towards becoming a search engine. It is still a popular search engine aroundthe world, ranking eighth in website popularity in 2023.

GeoCities was a revolutionary website founded in 1994 that allowed regular internet users to create their own web pages based on their hobbies or interests. It included a web directory of “neighborhoods” where users could design their own pages. These neighborhoods were themed to particular topics – for instance, the “Hollywood” neighborhood was geared towards film/TV interests and “SiliconValley” was devoted to computer topics. At its peak, there were at least 38,000,000 pages on GeoCities. GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 and officially went offline in 2009.

Netscape, which ranked fourth in 1995, originally started out as a web browser called Netscape Navigator in 1994. It was one of the companies that was engaged in the “browser wars” of the 1990s, with Netscape Navigator being pitted against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Netscape used their browser to drive traffic to their website. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 and the original Netscape website now redirects to AOL.

The fifth most visited website of 1995 was WebCrawler, one of the oldest search engines still in existence and was the first engine to provide a full text search. It launched in 1994 and was acquired by AOL in 1995.

When Did Google Become Popular? 

Google was officially created in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Stanford University. They began creating a search engine that utilized links to determine how popular a web page was. The name of the company is based on the number googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The Google.com domain was purchased in 1997. Brin and Page originally started working on the company at their dorm rooms at Stanford, but after a generous investment, they were able to move operations to a garage in Menlo Park, CA. The search engine because successful very quickly, and the company went public in 2004. Now, Google has offices and data centers in more than 200 cities around the world.

In addition to being the most popular search engine in the world, Google also offers an email service (Gmail) as well as a suite of word processing and collaboration tools including Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Calendar, and Google Chat.

What Are the Top Visited Websites of 2023?

As of November 2023, the top visited websites around the world are the following:

1. Google.com: 83,800,000,000 visitors
2. YouTube.com: 31,400,000,000 visitors
3. Facebook.com: 16,100,000,000 visitors
4. Instagram.com: 6,600,000,000 visitors
5. Twitter.com: 5,900,000,000 visitors
6. Baidu.com: 4,800,000,000 visitors
7. Wikipedia.org: 4,300,000,000 visitors
8. Yahoo.com: 3,400,000,000 visitors
9. Yandex.com: 3,200,000,000 visitors
10. WhatsApp.com: 3,000,000,000 visitors

Google has maintained its top position since 2011. Social media websites make up much of the top 10 most visited sites. Facebook was at the number two spot for many years before being overtaken by YouTube. In fourth is Instagram, followed by Twitter (now known as X) in fifth. It will be interesting to see what types of websites dominate the top 10 as the internet evolves in the future.

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The Most Visited Websites Between 1995-2023

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 1995

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 1996

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 1997

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 1998

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 1999

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2000

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2001

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2002

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2003

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2004

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The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2006

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The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2010

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2011

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2012

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2013

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2014

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2015

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2016

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2017

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2018

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2019

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2020

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2021

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2022

The 10 Most Visited Websites in 2023

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