The Top 25 web sites of 1994

Whenever I think about my first days on the web c. 1995 I think of WebCrawler, the original and for awhile the best fulltext web search engine. WebCrawler's creator, Brian Pinkerton, is now working for Technorati ranking the world's blogs, which isn't much different from what he was doing 12 years ago: ranking the world's then-tiny population of web sites. Back in March 1994, about six weeks after WebCrawler's launch and long before PageRank, Alexa, or del.icio.us, Pinkerton took stock of WebCrawler's index and ranked the 25 most-linked pages on the web. Back then WebCrawler knew about 72,000 documents on 2,200 servers, and the number one most-linked page (plus seven of the other 24) belonged to CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and was a page describing what, exactly, the WWW is. Of course, every page on the Top 25 is now long gone, and most of them can't even be found in the Internet Archive, so the closest you'll be able to get to that original #1 page is this archived version from 1992. Number two on the Top 25 is the home page for NCSA's Mosaic web browser, the direct predecessor to Netscape Navigator.

Tags: retro, Tim Berners-Lee, timbernerslee, top25, web, webcrawler, www