Not counting news sites such as BBC, are there any very big name/popular websites that started outside the US? I guess there are, I just can’t name any.
I mean sites such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, iTunes, etc. Search engines, email sites, stores, etc.
Do you mean “popular in the U.S.”? There are certainly Chinese web sites which are popular in China (for instance).
I guess I mean popular all over the world but I should add sites in English is what I am looking for.
Asking for further clarification: this means sites catering to an international audience, right?
Skype would be one.
Flickr started in Canada. (The company and site are now owned by Yahoo!.)
Chatroulette.com started in Moscow.
Panoramio in Spain.
Yes, catering to anyone in the world. I am not interested in illegal sites.
How popular?
I like http://b3ta.com/ (UK, probably not 100% SFW, especially the top picture on the current front page)
You are narrowing this down a bit!
Ummm, Last.fm, Rapidshare?
imdb started in Wales
I should have put the extra restrictions in my first post, just did not think of them until someone asked.
I’m just curious about sites started outside the US that Americans use because I realized I don’t use any non-US sites (that I know of).
Allofmp3.com, which was legal, and then made illegal, and shut down. Russian.
I wonder why the USA seems to usually be the default country. Like, the US version of a Web site is uaually .com and not .us, Google for instance has no immediately-accessible option for returning US results but they have similar options for most other countries, etc.
For the geeks:
Dinosaur Comics are written by a Canadian.
The Register, based in the UK, is fairly popular.
I guess because most of the big websites were started in the US. On my phone Google finds out where I am via GPS but I don’t know if they do that on a regular PC.
Good .com domains were snapped up by early adopters (.co.uk similarly so, but that tld convention didn’t work out as well in the long run).
I’m not sure what you mean about Google - every non-US Google domain I’ve ever used has a “Go to Google.com” link on the home page.
For Google, if you go to Google instead of just http://www.google.com/, it will prevent the country specific redirect and allow you to get to the US-based site from anywhere in the world.
.
IP is 208.122.50.173, which is based in the US.
IP is 72.3.246.59, which is based in the US. 
I’m curious about those sites that are internationally popular among more than a small niche crowd (e.g. Web comics) that are actually hosted outside of the United States. The only one I can think of off the top of my hand that meets the criteria of the OP is popurls at 87.230.55.42 in Germany.
IPs don’t mean a thing with regards to the origin of the site. I just launched the site of a company that is headquartered in Akron, with their European base in Germany, and their IP is out of London.