I have to disagree with all the people listing Google. I’ve been surfing the web since before webpages had pictures, and I don’t think it was that huge an improvement when Google came along. I look at it this way, if you logged in tomorrow and Google was down, you could easily go to Yahoo and hardly notice the difference. The same can’t be said about Wikipedia.
I came in to put an honorable mention for the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com). While not as vast as Wikipedia, I find that site settling more bets than anything.
After re-reading my post, I think I have a more significant “internet development”: Text formatting and pictures in webpages.
I think that ebay and imdb are more useful than Wikipedia.
I’d rate ebay as the single most unique thing on the internet. There were encyclopedias before wikipedia, and a search engine is only useful to find other things, but ebay is unique in being a one=stop global marketplace.
In terms of popularity, I would have to say social networking sites are up there. In fact I was just reading an article that stated searching for social networking sites has overtaken the search for Internet porn.
I vote for Yahoo. When the WWW first started to take off, the prevailing opinion was that it was cool and all, but not very useful because you had to know the URL of the page you wanted or you couldn’t find it. Yahoo fixed that.
This might be cheating, but SSL - Secure Sockets Layer. It allows for secure transactions. Without it, nobody could safely buy stuff online, or sell stuff online, or pay their bills online. It allows the Internet to be used as a means of commerce, and not just a clever way to look up trivia and share captioned kitteh pictures.
Certainly not the top, but honorable mention: Pandora/P2P/Internet radio. Huugggeee exposure to new artists and musical styles. To those of us that place music fairly central to our lives, this is quite high on the list of Great Things.
Joey Tightlips, yes, there were search engines pre-Google. Metacrawler was, IMHO, the best of the lot. But the references here to Google fu and search prowess are nothing compared to what was needed pre-Google to find relevant information. Night and day – when Google was new, as soon as you tried it once or twice you never went back. Perhaps, though, just as Lakai points out that the alternatives you mentioned wouldn’t be around without Google, Google wouldn’t be around if not for Metacrawler or the original Yahoo. Perhaps Search Engine should top the list?
If you’re looking at Internet protocols, I’d put email first and http second. Saying “porn” is probably the equivalent of saying Usenet is the best Internet development of all time – after all, Usenet was delivering porn to lonely geeks since the 1980s – but how relevant is it today? The text newsgroups have been clogged with spam since the late 1990s, and abandoned for message boards by the majority of its former users. The binary groups are a thing of wonder, but it’s not a make-it-or-break-it feature of the Internet; most aren’t even aware they exist.
Looking at Web sites, I’d say Google too. Wikipedia is a wonderful resource, but if it didn’t exist, one could use the sites found by Google to research a certain topic.
I remember all too well the horrid search engines of the pre-Google era. When Google went live, I ditched my Netscape bookmark for Hotbot right there.
Actually, I might change my vote to this. I remember going on the web the first time (through AOL!) and being baffled and what I was supposed to do now. I tried looking for newspapers and magazines that I might like to read, but I think most of their sites were still under construction. (This would have been in 1995, I think.) Then one morning I heard the Yahoo guys on a local radio show (I lived in the Bay Area, so this was local interest), explaining what a search engine was, and when I tried it, IT WORKED. I could find…stuff! If I wanted to find the Hamster Dance (ah, the glorious days of the mid-90s), I could! Yeah, it wasn’t as good as Google is now, but before this, the Web was barely navigable.
I disagree with this. The difference between Google and earlier search engines is much greater than the car comparison. Also the fact that the car you imagine has yet to be realized shows what an accomplishment it would be.
