I have posted a spreadsheet that reviews the comScore press releases throughout the years, ranking web "families" of sites by traffic counts. I simply took the Top 25 sites from each year and posted their ranks.

There's a glaring gap in that comScore didn't issue any press releases in 2005 related to their overall ranking index.

I will probably try to add to this analysis with information from Alexa, although that site measures only specific domains, not corporate agglomerations of sites.

A few things are still clear, though:

1. Wikipedia is a real newcomer to the list of Top 25 sites, much like the Fox/MySpace phenomenon, and to some extent similar to Apple/ITunes, NY Times, and Adobe.

2. Companies that were once in the Big Time don't always stay there. Remember Altavista? They were in the Top 15 for three years running (two of those years in the Top 10). It's no longer even in the Top 200 (according to Alexa). And Excite.com? Seems to have just nosedived out of the Alexa Top 1000, despite being the #9 site just four years ago.

At this time, I would welcome any commentary from the WR, especially in two areas:

A. Did I mess up anything in the spreadsheet, especially vis-a-vis not spotting a merger that should be combined? (I know that I deliberately kept AOL and Time-Warner separate.)

B. Does this give us any guidance or insight into the characteristics of domains that succeed in remaining popular for years and years, versus those that inevitably flame out? What lessons might Wikipedia learn, if it wished to remain in the Top 10 for as long as possible?

Greg

Just a reminiscence. I can still remember a time when AltaVista was the leading search engine among academics and Google was just a baby, mostly being used by online shoppers. And then AltaVista added ads, and it immediately tanked for research purposes.

Jonny

It wasn't the ads. Altavista stopped updating their search index due to technical problems. For quite a while, as I recall - at least a month. They lost a big part of their market share when that happened and never really recovered.

"I can still remember a time when AltaVista was the leading search engine etc"

Those were the days. I recall it being at http://digital.altavista.com/. They could not use altavista.com because there was already a company called Altavista.

There was also Northern Light, which was trendy for a very brief period, at least in my neck of the woods. And Lycos, which started out a bit like Google, with a simple search bar and some buttons.

Lycos as proto-Google:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961022175214/.../www.lycos.com/

They seem to have ditched "Go Get It" some time between January and April in 2001, coinciding with the company's brief rebranding as the Blackburn Auto Group:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010303015444/http://lycos.com/

Perhaps that is when they had the technical problems mentioned above.

As long as we're searching down memory lane, here's the search engine bookmarks from my old Netscape browser, circa 2001 or so:

• http://www.altavista.com
• http://www.cnet.com/
• http://www.alltheweb.com/
• http://www.alltheweb.com/advanced?c=web
• http://www.google.com/advanced_search.html
• http://www.Go2Net.com/index.html
• http://www.kartoo.com/
• http://www.links2go.com/
• http://lycospro.lycos.com/
• http://www.metacrawler.com/
• http://www.northernlight.com/
• http://www.northernlight.com/power.html
• http://odysseus.ieee.org/
• http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
• http://www.scirus.com/
• http://www.smartpages.com/
• http://www.vivisimo.com/

There was also Copernic, a Metasearch engine that I used to use a lot, but eventually quit bothering to update it.

Jonny

Is there any way to separate MSN from the rest of Microsoft? I can't imagine MSN would be #1 by itself...

MySpace, which is now under Fox/NewsCorp, would have been part of eUniverse prior to NewCorp's purchase of Intermix Media in 2005, and I suspect "AWS Technology" might be related to Amazon in some way, but those are the only ones I can think of on cursory examination.


Advertising campaigns alone don't get the job done, maybe? I remember seeing TV and print ads for a lot of those sites that only show up once, like iWON.com, but once the ads went away, their rankings apparently dropped.


Improve their search engine in a very big way, obviously... Then again, I'm not so sure I want to give them any good ideas!

Wikipedia can lose the larger battle. As I have said before, Citizendium is like turtle and Wikipedia the hare.

Altavista and hotbot were the first massive search indices. But soon spammers figured out how to fill those first indices with spam, thus undermining Altavista's and hotbot's value. Google solved this by adding another large of information into its ranking system take took into account a measure of implicit community reputation (incoming links.) The parallels to Wikipedia may be stronger than we first realized.

Has anybody else checked out Kratia yet? It's still in beta, but it factors votes into its rankings, and only allows you one vote per IP, apparently. It's pretty cool to be able to vote down Wikipedia pages when I see 'em, which actually isn't that often!

One vote per IP? I believe that most spammers these days run botnets across thousands of compromised computers, which would be the perfect platform for gaming a search engine that allows only one vote per IP. I think Google's implicit voting mechanism is preferred over an explicit system.