The internet is a big place. There are thousands of websites out there, and many of them have earned their place among the top most popular sites.
Google is a multinational conglomerate that operates the world’s most popular search engine. It was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D students at Stanford University, California; they wanted to create a better search engine than existing ones at the time (such as Yahoo! and AltaVista). Google has more than 70 offices in more than 40 countries with more than 70,000 employees worldwide. The company also owns YouTube (the largest video sharing site), Android (the most used mobile operating system), Chrome OS (an open source operating system based on Linux), Gmail (one of the most popular email services) and many more products and services used by millions of people everyday around the world!
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. The site’s headquarters are located in San Bruno, California. The name “YouTube” originated from the phrase “video you”, which was coined by Jawed Karim when he was having trouble finding a name for a video he had recorded at his desk earlier that day at work. Karim uploaded that video to YouTube and it was titled “Me at the zoo”.
Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, with more than 2 billion monthly active users. The company was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and launched as a private entity. In 2012, Facebook became a public company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. It has its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Twitter is a social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7th 2017, this limit was increased to 280 characters for all languages except Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity; over 100 million users post 340 million tweets each day about their lives (including sharing pictures), making it one of the largest sources of user-generated content on the Internet.
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and launched in October 2010 exclusively on iOS. A version for Android devices was released a year and half later, in April 2012. The app allows users to upload photos which can be edited with various filters to create photographic compositions known as selfies or collages (or “artsy fartsy” portraits). Users can also apply digital effects such as tilt-shift (a technique that makes an image look like it was taken with a camera lens that has shallow depth of field) or high contrast black-and-white filters..
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our list of the top websites in the world. We were surprised to see how many of them are actually owned by Google, but we guess it makes sense when you think about how much people use these sites every day!
