Oh, what a world-wide web we've weaved

1. Websites that changed the world – by John Naughton (from The Observer)

Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer's Net specialist charts the web's remarkable early life and we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date. Tell us what you think of our choices here

Johannes Gutenberg took the idea of printing by moveable type and turned it into a publishing system. In doing so he changed the world. But he did not live to see the extent of the revolution he had brought about. If you'd told him in 1468 - the year he died - that the Bible he had published in 1455 would undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood, he would have looked at you blankly.

But there lives among us today a man who has done something similar, and survived to see the fruits of his work. He is Tim Berners-Lee, and he conceived a system for turning the internet into a publishing medium. Just over 15 years ago - on 6 August 1991, to be precise - he released the code for his invention on to the internet. He called it the World Wide Web, and had the inspired idea that it should be free so that anyone could use it.

And just about everyone did, with the result that the web grew exponentially. Today nobody really knows how big it is. At a recent conference, Yahoo's head of research and development put the size of the public web at 40 billion pages, but the size of the 'deep' web, the area where web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in response to clicked-upon links, is estimated to be between 400 and 750 times greater than the part that is indexed by search engines. Since you started reading this piece, thousands of pages have been added.

By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our information environment. And the strange thing is that it has come about in just 15 years. Actually, most of it has happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first graphical browsers - the computer programs we use to access the web - were released. So these are early days. We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg could.

The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments to rent on Craigslist or a host of local lookalikes such as Daft.ie in Ireland. You can buy and sell just about anything (excluding body parts) on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search for them on Google Images (and download them without undue concern for intellectual property rights). Holiday snaps escape from their shoeboxes and are published to the world on Flickr. Home movies likewise on YouTube. And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger.

All this we now take for granted. To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver's Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. 'Encyclopedia' was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called 'travel agents'.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the web we've assembled a list of sites that have become the virtual wallpaper of our lives. What the corresponding list will be like in 15 years' time is anyone's guess. As the man said, if you want to know the future, go buy a crystal ball. In the meantime, read on and wonder.

·John Naughton's history of the internet, A Brief History of the Future, is published by Phoenix at £7.99

1. eBay.com
Founded: Pierre Omidyar, 1995, US
Users: 168m
What is it? Auction and shopping site

You cannot buy fireworks, guns, franking machines, animals or lock-picking devices on eBay, the internet's premier auction site, but almost everything else is OK: sideburns, houses, used underwear and of course Pez dispensers.

Pez is where it is said to have all begun for eBay's ponytailed founder Pierre Omidyar when he responded to his fiancee's worries that she would no longer be able to expand her toy collection when they moved to Silicon Valley. Omidyar developed a car boot sale anyone could use wherever they were, and without the need for getting dressed. The name sprang from Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consultancy company, and the first sale was a broken laser pointer.

Things have moved on a little since then. We spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 10 million users in the UK. And eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to eBay full time, and normally sane people fret about 'negative feedback' and being outbid by 'snipers'. eBay owns PayPal and Skype, making dealing almost effortless.
Simon Garfield

2. wikipedia.com
Founded: Jimmy Wales, 2001, US
Users: 912,000 visits per day
What is it? Online encyclopaedia

As a young boy growing up in Hunstville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales attended a one-room school, sharing his classes with only three other children. Here he spent 'many hours poring over encyclopaedias', and faced the familiar frustrations: their scope was conservative; they were hard to navigate and often out of date.

In January 2001 he created a solution. Wikipedia was a free online encyclopaedia and differed from its predecessors in one fundamental regard: it was open to everyone to read, and also to edit. If you had something to add - from a pedantic correction to an entire entry on your specialist subject - the Wiki template made this easy. The software enables entries to be updated within minutes of new developments. There is nothing you cannot find - how best to make glass, the use of the nappy in space exploration - and if something isn't there, you may wish to take matters into your own hands.

Like any fast-moving venture - the site attracts 2,000-plus page requests a second - it has not been slow to attract criticism. Occasionally a libellous article will lie undetected for months, as happened with an entry linking one of Robert Kennedy's aides with his assassination. But Wales says his creation is abused only rarely, and swiftly corrected by other users. 'Those who use Wikipedia a lot appreciate its true value and have learnt to trust it,' he says. 'Sometimes a prankster will substitute a picture of Hitler for George Bush, and within an hour someone would have changed it back.'
SG

3. napster.com
Founded: Shawn Fanning, 1999, US
Users: 500,000 paying subscribers
What is it? File-sharing site

Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999 while studying at Boston's Northeastern University, as a means of sharing music files with his fellow students. Of course, it was entirely illegal (home taping kills music, remember) and was quickly attacked by a mainstream music industry already struggling to make profits on its money-guzzling artists. Its popularity reached a peak in 2000 with over 70 million registered users before Fanning's company was forced to pay millions of dollars in backdated royalties: a move which bankrupted the original, free-to-use Napster the following year. By then, however, the premature leaking and sharing of hotly anticipated albums by some of the major labels' most bankable artists had proved to be a stimulant, not a thief, of sales once the CD version was released. The new Napster - effectively a renamed version of a pay-to-download MP3 site owned by the original Napster company's buyers, the German giant Bertelsmann- has never recaptured its original cool, precisely because it is now legitimate. What it did in its brief period of illegal notoriety was popularise the notion that making music freely available on the internet - through MySpace, one-off downloads or artist-sanctioned 'leaks' - does artists no harm at all; indeed, it's helped to launch the careers of many.
Lynsey Hanley

4. youtube.com
Founded: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, 2005, US
Users: 100m clips watched a day
What is it? Video-sharing site

When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began working out of a garage in San Mateo in late 2004 to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny videos they'd taken at a dinner party, they had no idea just how huge an impact their creation would make. The former PayPal employees launched the user-friendly site in February 2005 and it has since become one of the most popular sites on the net, with YouTube claiming that 100 million clips are watched every day. Through the grassroots power of the internet and good word-of-mouth, the site quickly went from a place where people shared homemade video clips to users posting long-lost TV and film gems such as bloopers from Seventies game shows to ancient music videos. It has also taken off as a place for amateur film-makers to show off their talents - take David Lehre, a teenager whose MySpace: The Movie became such a popular clip he's already fielded job offers from major movie studios.

Not all television studios immediately embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared. 'We're not here to steal,' insists Chen. 'When [US television network] NBC asked us to take something down, we did.' In fact, NBC only last week announced plans to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers and eventually hoping to post episodes of The Office and Saturday Night Live on it. The company has had several offers to be bought out, but the pair swear they will not sell out. They continue to work out of their San Mateo loft, overseeing 27 employees and developing ways to make the site easier to use while whirling lucrative deals with studios.
Gillian Telling

5. blogger.com
Founded: Evan Williams, 1999, US
Users: 18.5m unique visitors
What is it? Weblog publishing system

There weren't too many computers lying around in the cornfields of Nebraska in the 1970s when Evan Williams was growing up. But he was drawn to them when he found them. He was also drawn west, to California in the 1990s. Williams founded Pyra Labs with two friends. At first it made project-management software for companies. It was not glamorous. Then it made Blogger and changed the world.

'The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn't see the commercial applications,' says Williams. 'We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn't see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.'

The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog - of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online. It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn't just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down.

Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people. After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but collectively they were massive. 'Now you see TV networks saying: "We've gotta get on the web because that's where the audience is,"' says Williams.

There is no accurate count of the number of blogs in existence now. There are millions. One is created every minute. The revolution might have been possible without Blogger but it would have taken everyone a lot longer.

'Something like it would have existed anyway,' says Williams. 'And lots of things like it do exist. It was a combination of helping push an idea as well as just being in the right place at the right time when the idea was right.'
Rafael Behr

6. friendsreunited.com
Founded: Steve and Julie Pankhurst, 1999, UK
Users: 15m
What is it? School reunion site

In July 2000, as the dreams of the internet boom crumbled around them, a husband-and-wife team were busy launching a rough and ready web phenomenon. Friends Reunited, which was sold to ITV for £120m last December, was Julie Pankhurst's brainchild. While pregnant, she became obsessed with finding out what her old friends had been up to since they left school. Her husband Steve, a computer programmer, had been brainstorming with his business partner Jason Porter for an original internet-based idea, and Julie suggested a website to cater for her newfound obsession. It took her some time to convince them. 'In the end,' says Steve, 'I designed Friends Reunited just to shut her up.'

The site took off slowly, getting half a dozen hits per day, but everything changed at the start of 2001 when its lone server collapsed. 'The Steve Wright show on Radio 2 had made us their website of the day. Tens of thousands of people had tried to access the site at the same time.' Within a month membership rose from 3,000 to 19,000; the couple were working 18-hour days. Friends Reunited quickly became a household name and membership soared into the millions.
Killian Fox

7. drudgereport.com
Founded: Matt Drudge, 1994, US
Users: 8-10m page views per day
What is it? News site

What began as a gossipy email newsletter has, since its first post in 1994, developed into one of the most powerful media outlets in American politics. Today the Drudge Report has evolved into a website, drudgereport.com, and its threadbare, no-frills design belies the scale of its influence. It received an estimated 3.5 billion hits in the last 12 months; visitors regard it as the first port of call for breaking news.

Fedora-wearing founder Matt Drudge monitors TV and the internet for rumours and stories which he posts as headlines on his site. For the most part these are direct links to traditional news sites, though occasionally Drudge writes the stories himself. In 1998 he was the first to break news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Named this year as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, the 38-year-old regards himself as a maverick newsman working free from the demands of editors and advertisers. Others, particularly critics from the left, view his reportage as biased towards conservatives, careless, malicious and frequently prone to error.

A report in 1997, alleging that White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal physically abused his wife, generated a $30m lawsuit against Drudge, which was dropped in 2001. In June 2004, Drudge apologised for a February 'world exclusive' claiming that John Kerry had had an affair with an intern.

Drudge has been labelled a 'threat to democracy' and an 'idiot with a modem' as well as 'the kind of bold, entrepreneurial, free-wheeling, information-oriented outsider we need more of in this country' (by Camille Paglia); his importance in the US media is undisputed.
KF

8. myspace.com
Founded: Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, 2003, US
Users: 100m
What is it? Social networking site

When business-school alumnus Chris DeWolfe set up the social networking site MySpace with his partner, ex-band member and film studies graduate Tom Anderson, three years ago, there was little indication that the one-stop online friend-making shop would soon boast 100 million members and more page visits in Britain than the BBC. The pair envisaged a site that would bring together all the qualities of existing online communities such as Friendster, Tribe.net and LiveJournal, with added features including classified adverts and events planning.

They got the formula just right: the MySpace-opolis is growing by 240,000 a day, making it the fourth most-visited website in the world. DeWolfe believes that the key to the site's success is its founders' rapport with the people who use it. 'We looked at it from the point of view of how people live their lives,' he says.

One of those features is the ability to upload and listen to music, which has attracted 2.2 million new bands and artists to the site, some of whom - most famously Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys - can attribute their chart success to having spread the word through MySpace.

MySpace's parent company, Intermix, was bought by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp last year for $580m, causing consternation among some of the music world's more politicised acts, but no large-scale boycott. The site is simply too valuable and effective - and ubiquitous - to ignore.
LH

9. amazon.com
Founded: Jeff Bezos, 1994, US
Users: More than 35m customers in over 250 countries
What is it? Online retailer, primarily of books, CDs and DVDs

The earth's biggest bookstore was originally called Cadabra, but Jeff Bezos thought again after his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'. He chose Amazon as something large and unstoppable and so, with current annual revenues of $8bn, it has proved. It was just a trickle to begin with though: the first office was in a Seattle suburb with desks made out of old doors. But it quickly became the headline act of the dotcom miracle and Bezos was Time magazine's man of the year in 1999. Amazon's continued dominance rests on price-slashing that would make Wal-Mart wince, and a reputation for reliability. Though selling books (and now almost everything else) on a vast scale, it has tried never to forget the value of intimacy.
Tim Adams

10. slashdot.org
Founded: Rob Malda, 1997, US
Users: 5.5m per month
What is it? Technology news website and internet forum

'I'm just a geek that likes to poke around with hardware,' says Rob Malda. His site, Slashdot.org, hosts news and discussion for techies and is one of the most visited websites in the world. Time magazine included him in its top 100 innovators, stating: 'Malda has taken the idea of what news can be, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the internet age.'

Most of the site is written by users; posts include a short synopsis paragraph, a link to the original story and a lengthy discussion sometimes running to 10,000 comments a day. Slashdot pioneered this user-driven content, and influenced sites including Google News, Guardian Unlimited and Wikipedia. In 2002 the site leaked the ruling of a court case involving Microsoft before the verdict had even been delivered to Microsoft or the US government. There is also the Slashdot effect, where a site is swamped by heavy traffic from a Slashdot link and its server collapses.

In 1997, 21-year-old Malda started what we would now call a blog, hosted on his user account at university. As the site picked up users he divided his time between college, paid work and the site. 'It was a blur. There were many nights when I did not sleep.' Two years later Andover bought Slashdot for $5m, shared between Malda, co-founder Jeff 'Hemos' Bates and other partners. They also shared $7m in stock between them. In 2000 VA Linux (now VA Software) bought Andover for $900m. Slashdot now has 10 employees dedicated to maintaining the site, most of them based in California. Malda has remained in Michigan, where he grew up and went to college. He is director of Slashdot. He proposed to his wife Kathleen on the site in 2002.
Katie Toms

11. salon.com
Founded: David Talbot, 1995, US
Users: Between 2.5 and 3.5m unique visitors per month
What is it? Online magazine and media company

Salon grew out of a strike. When the San Francisco Examiner was shut for a couple of weeks in 1994 a few of its journalists taught themselves HTML and had a go at doing a newspaper with new technology. They found the experience liberating, and David Talbot, the Examiner's arts editor, subsequently gave up his job and launched the kind of online paper he had always wanted to work for. Salon was originally a forum for discussing books, but the editors quickly realised it had to be more journalistic than that. They aimed at creating a 'smart tabloid', not afraid to be mischievous while maintaining a rigour with news. Talbot believes that online journalism came of age with the death of Princess Diana and the Lewinsky scandal. It proved with those events that it could be nimbler and more gossipy, it could update itself continually and, crucially, let readers join in. Salon's Table Talk forum established a new relationship between a news outfit and its audience, letting readers write themselves into the story.

Salon was not afraid of muck-raking. When Talbot decided to run a story about Henry Hyde, who was to sit in judgment of Bill Clinton after the Starr report, he was roundly criticised not just by the entrenched Washington media but also by some on his own staff. The story concerned Hyde's extramarital affair of 30 years before, and the more august sections of the American media, not to mention the right-wing impeachers of the President, thought this was beyond the pale. Talbot recalls how Salon 'got bomb threats, I received death threats... [but] I think if as a new organisation that comes into the world, a new media operation, you don't take risks with stories that no one else does, then what's the point?'

For all its journalistic success, Salon has always struggled financially. A couple of times the site has nearly gone under; on one occasion Talbot was forced to fire his wife who ran a women's page. A subscription system saved it, along with the growth in online advertising. These days Talbot sees Salon's competitors as the big news organisations, the New York Times and so on, who have strong online presence. Having shown a few of them how it's done, Salon now faces a daily battle to stay ahead of the game.
TA

12. craigslist.org
Founded: Craig Newmark, 1995, US
Users: 4bn page views per month
What is it? A centralised network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements and forums

Craigslist is one of the most deceptively simple websites on the internet. It is also one of the most powerful. It is - pretty much - simply a free noticeboard. But its astonishing popularity has given it immense power. Want to rent an apartment? Sell a car? Find a job? Meet someone to spend the night with? Craiglist will provide the answers. For free. It has revolutionised urban living in America. It has also undercut one of the main reasons for newspapers: classified advertising. As nearly all Craigslist's content is free, it rarely censors ads and its readers number in the millions, it is far more useful to post an advert on the site than in your local newspaper. Thus a huge decline in newspaper ads and revenue, triggering cost-cutting which will see reporters tossed on to the scrap heap... and the end of a free press and democracy as we know it (if the critics are to be believed).

The website was founded by Craig Newmark, an ubergeek with a hippyish mentality. It started as a simple email that he would send around listing various events going on in San Francisco. From such humble beginnings Craigslist has grown into a multi-million-dollar business. Yet Newmark refuses to sell his company or charge for every ad.

Why should you care? Craigslist is all over the world - and coming to your home town soon.
Paul Harris

13. google.com
Founded: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998, US
Users: A billion search requests per day
What is it? Search engine and media corporation

Its name is listed as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. It commands the largest internet search engine in the world. It is the fastest-growing company in history and its founders are worth almost $13bn each.

The search method devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was instrumental to Goggle's success. Rather than ranking results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page, their system measured the frequency with which a website was referenced by other sites. Another key factor was the site's stripped-down design, which made it speedier and more accessible than its competitors.

From such plain foundations a gigantic empire has sprung and is branching out into email (with Gmail), news (Google News), price comparison (Froogle), cartography (Google Maps), literature (with the much contested Google Book Search), free telephony (Google Talk), and, most strikingly, Google Earth, an incredibly detailed virtual globe. Google styles itself as a laidback, hippyish organisation but its founding motto, 'Don't Be Evil', is already being tested: the compromise it reached with China over censorship has proved particularly contentious.
KF

14. yahoo.com
Founded: David Filo and JerryYang, 1994, US
Users: 400m
What is it? Internet portal and media corporation

It receives an average of 3.4bn page hits a day, making it the single most visited website on the internet, but in recent years Yahoo! has been eclipsed by Google. Both companies were launched on a very small scale by Stanford University graduates and, very soon the portal that Jerry Yang and David Filo had started as a hobby was en route to becoming the most popular search engine on the web. On the back of its early success, Yahoo! (an acronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle') branched out into email, instant messaging, news, gaming, online shopping and an array of other services.

It also started buying up other companies such as Geocities, eGroups and the web radio company Broadcast.com. Yahoo! survived the internet collapse at the start of the decade and brought former Warner Bros chief exec Terry Semel on board in 2001 to navigate the difficult waters of the post-boom period. Semel began to address the challenge of making money out of the internet without relying on advertising revenue alone. Google notwithstanding, Yahoo! is still very much a contender.
KF

15. easyjet.com
Founded: Stelios
Haji-Ioannou, 1995, UK
Users: 30m passengers last year
What is it?: Budget airline

It's easy to forget what it was like back in the old days, when we didn't just pay a tenner, pitch up at Luton and pop over to Rome for the weekend. We mini-breaked in Bournemouth. Travelling to Scotland was an all-day affair. Airlines issued quaint old-fashioned things such as meals. And tickets. And seats.

And then along came Stelios. That's Stelios as in Haji-Ioannou, although he now, alongside Delia and Jamie and Sven, belongs in that rare category - the surnameless celebrity. He's also that other elusive British beast - the celebrity entrepreneur. In 1995, after borrowing £30m from his dad, a shipping magnate, he leased two second-hand Boeings and began selling flights to Scotland for £29 each way.

EasyJet was the first low-cost British airline and, presciently, the first to start taking bookings over the internet, although, as Stelios admits, he wasn't won over straight away.

'We started off as something very obscure like 1145678.com. And I said: "This is never going to fill the planes. It's just for nerds." Then some time in 1997 we bought the domain easyjet.com for about £1,000 and put up a proper website. At that time we had the telephone number in big letters on the side of the plane. And we put a different telephone number on the website. Week after week I watched how quickly the numbers were growing and that gave me the confidence in April 1997 to launch a booking site.'

It was, he says, the neatest and simplest way: 'you outsource the work to the customer'. And it turned him into an internet evangelical. The first company he set up after easyJet was easyInternetcafe and all 15 companies in the easyGroup have some sort of web component.


2. You Are What You Search AOL's data leak reveals the seven ways people search the Web.
By Paul Boutin

AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members -- a total of 36,389,629 individual searches. AOL's search nerds intended the files to be an academic resource but didn't consider that users might be peeved to see their private queries become a research tool. Last weekend, the Internet service provider tried to pull back the data, but by that point it had leaked all over the Web. If you've ever wanted to see what other people type into search boxes, now's your chance.

The search records don't include users' names, but each search is tagged with a number that's tied to a specific AOL account. The New York Times quickly sussed out that AOL Searcher No. 4417749 was 62-year-old Thelma Arnold. Indeed, Arnold has a "dog who urinate on everything," just as she'd typed into the search box. Valleywag has become one of many clearinghouses for funny, bizarre, and painful user profiles. The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby" to "foods to eat when pregnant" to "abortion clinics charlotte nc" to "can christians be forgiven for abortion."

While these case studies are good voyeuristic fodder, snooping through one user's life barely scratches the surface of this data trove. The startup company I work for, Splunk, makes software to search computer-generated log files. AOL's 36 million log entries might look like an Orwellian nightmare to you, but for us it's a user transaction case study to die for. Using the third-party site splunkd.com, I've parsed the AOL data to create a typology of AOL Search users. Which of the seven types of searcher are you?

The Pornhound.
Big surprise, there are millions of searches for mind-bendingly kinky stuff. User No. 927 is already an Internet legend. When I clicked Splunk's "Show Events by Time" button, though, I found that porn searchers vary not only by what they search for, but when they search for it. Some users are on a quest for pornography at all hours, seeking little else from AOL. Another subgroup, including No. 927, search only within reliable time slots. The data doesn't list each user's time zone, but 11 p.m. Eastern and 11 p.m. Pacific appear to be prime time for porn on AOL's servers. My favorite plots show hours of G-rated searches before the user switches gears -- what I call the Avenue Q Theory of Internet usage. User No. 190827 goes from "talking parrots jokes" and "poems about a red rose" before midnight to multiple clicks for "sexy dogs and hot girls" a half hour later. An important related discovery: Nobody knows how to spell "bestiality."

The Manhunter.
The person who searches for other people. Again, I used Splunk's "Show Events by Time" function to plot name searches by date and time. Surprisingly, I didn't uncover many long-term stalkers. Most of the data showed bursts of searches for a specific name only once, all within an hour or a day, and then never again. Maybe these folks are background-checking job candidates, maybe they're looking up the new cutie at the office, or maybe they just miss old friends. Most of the names in AOL's logs are too ambiguous to pinpoint to a single person in the real world, so don't get too tweaked if you find your own name and hometown in there. I've got it much worse. There are 36 million searches here, but none of them are for me.

The Shopper.
The user who hits "treo 700" 37 times in three days. Here, the data didn't confirm my biases. I'd expected to find window shoppers who searched for Porsche Cayman pages every weekend. But AOL's logs reveal that searches for "coupons" are a lot more common. My favorite specimen is the guy who mostly looked up food brands like Dole, Wendy's, Red Lobster, and Turkey Hill, with an occasional break for "asian movie stars." How much more American could America Online get?

The Obsessive.
The guy who searches for the same thing over and over and over. Looking at the search words themselves can obfuscate a more general long-term pattern -- A, A, A, A, B, A, A, C, A, D, A—that suggests a user who can't let go of one topic, whether it's Judaism, real estate, or Macs. Obsessives are most likely to craft advanced search terms like "craven randy fanfic -wes" and "pfeffern**sse."

The Omnivore.
Many users aren't obsessive -- they're just online a lot. My taxonomy fails them, because their search terms, while frequent, show little repetition or regularity. Still, I can spot a few subcategories. There are the trivia buffs who searched "imdb" hundreds of times in three months and the nostalgia surfers on the hunt for "pat benatar helter skelter lyrics."

The Newbie.
They just figured out how to turn on the computer. User No. 12792510 is one of many who confuses AOL's search box with its browser address window -- he keeps seaching for "www.google." Other AOLers type their searches without spaces between the words ("newcaddillacdeville") as if they were 1990s-era AOL keywords .

The Basket Case.
In college I had to write a version of the classic ELIZA program, a pretend therapist who only responds to your problems ("I am sad") with more questions ("Why do you say you are sad?"). AOL Search, it seems, serves the same purpose for a lot of users. I stumbled across queries like "i hate my job" and "why am i so ugly." For me, one log entry stands above the rest: "i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life." Me too, 3696023. Me too.


3. What Are Web Surfers Seeking? Well, It's Just What You'd Think -- by LEE GOMES

One thing about us Internet users: We like our music, we like our pictures, we like our sex -- and we like them all free.

Last week, AOL released a trove of what it thought were anonymous Web-search data from 650,000 of its customers. While intending to help researchers, AOL instead set off a privacy controversy because some of the users could, in fact, be tracked down. But taking up AOL on its original intentions, I got hold of the data set -- 2.27 gigabytes' worth, loaded it into my shiny new SQL Server database software, and started my own research project into how people really use the Web.

One learns, for instance, that excepting prepositions and conjunctions, the most commonly used word in the 17.15 million separate searches was "free." If something isn't free, it better at least be "new," as that was the next-most common word.

Excluding proper nouns, the next most popular words were "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "beach," "high," "map," "center" and "sex."

Ah, sex. The Web turns out to be every bit the domain of the unbounded id we always thought it was. According to a research paper about the data prepared by an AOL-led team, porn was the third most common activity of Web searchers, behind entertainment and shopping. My study showed that 14% of all users made some form of explicit sexual search. And sex was No. 44 on the list of Greatest Hits words; usually, it's around 2,500 for standard usage, such as in English-language novels.

Among the sex searchers, there were 50,549 inquires for nude pictures. Perhaps for the first time in Internet history, the person most requested wasn't Pamela Anderson. In fact, it wasn't even a woman, but Peter Wentz, boyish singer of pop group Fall Out Boy. Ms. Anderson was second, followed by Paris Hilton.

How good is the Web with queries not involving naked celebrities? Users seem to think it needs improving, because in 47% of all searches, they didn't click on any of the results presented to them. (Although that could also mean they got the answer they needed just from the information in the list of links they were given.)

The AOL researchers noted that 28% of all searches were refinements of earlier searches, as users reshaped their queries to make the results more in sync with what they were looking for.

For those searchers who did click on something, in 42% of the time, they clicked on the first link presented to them. That factoid explains why Web sites spend so much money boosting their search-engine rankings.

In looking through all of the queries, I found 413,638 that were questions, that is, beginning with one of the five W's. Some 35% of these questioners never clicked on an answer, though I am not sure what even the best search engine could have done with a question like, "How to find your eye color."

How good is the Web at actually answering questions? I took a random sample of 50 "question" searches, and then visited the Web page that questioners had clicked on.

By my reckoning, 60% of these sites provided reasonable answers to what the user wanted to know, which included, "How to propose to a man," and "How to install more memory in a computer."

Unanswered queries included, "How to potty train a new puppy" and "How strong are gymnasts." The first went to a company that sold dog food, the second to a Russian gymnast training school looking to raise money.

Returning to the list of most frequently used words -- I need to thank Greg Sadestky of Poly9, fine purveyor of "mash up" map software, for his help -- "Google" was the 17th most common. While some might scoff at the notion of "searching for Google," it's actually efficient Web surfing. You're relying on the friendly, type-fixing search box, rather than the unforgiving URL bar at the top of your browser.

In the same vein, don't do what 15% of people in the sample did, and include the full URL, including "http" and "www" and ".com" in the search box. It's a waste of time and keystrokes.

The data were collected from March through May. Here are some random searches, and the numbers for each: Britney Spears -- 3,938; God -- 3,279; Madonna -- 1,881; Mother Teresa -- 165; Stephen Hawking -- 41; Kofi Annan -- 12. While clearly celebrities did well, writers seemed to fare badly. Indeed, there were no searches at all for such modern masters as Malcolm Lowry, Martin Amis and Lee Gomes.

Data aside, reading these queries is like listening in on random phone calls; even if you don't know who is talking, the experience can be wrenching.

Consider the person who, over the course of a few minutes, searched for "What to do when your Christian husband turns away from God," "How to deal with mental abuse in a Christian marriage" and "Do I stay or go when a Christian husband is on drugs and alcohol."

One of the recommended sites gave thoughtful answers to important life questions from an evangelical Christian perspective. The other hawked Bible books.

(Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com)


4. Local hero
It started as a free online noticeboard helping people find babysitters and rehome old sofas ... Now Craigslist has become a global phenomenon. Adam Higginbotham meets Craig Newmark, its painfully geeky founder (from The Observer)

At 54, Craig Newmark sits in the office of his small, newly renovated house in a quiet suburb of San Francisco and taps at the keyboard of his computer. The deck outside, washed in blinding summer sunlight, is hung with two different bird feeders and a special device filled with sugar solution to attract hummingbirds - Newmark's newest obsession. It also affords a view down into Cole Valley and up into the wooded hillside of Sutro Forest. On the wall beside the French windows hangs a portrait of Leonard Cohen and a 2006 calendar depicting scenes from The Simpsons

Today - as he does all day, every day, seven days a week - Newmark is obsessively checking his email, policing the traffic and transactions, the message boards and classified ads of Craigslist, the seventh most popular English-language website in the world. With 4bn page views per month, the site to which Newmark gave his name is now just ahead of the Disney network (total number of employees: 133,000) and right behind the constellation of sites, including MySpace, run by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (total employees: 38,000); Craigslist's 300 sites around the world are maintained by a staff, including Craig himself, of 22. The business has developed the same reach as Google or eBay: Newmark and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster could sell it tomorrow and become very rich men. And yet they have never seriously entertained an offer nor, they say, will they do so in the future. In an industry synonymous with avarice and land-grab economics, the men from Craigslist have resisted the temptation to make a quick profit; indeed, they don't really seem to be interested in money at all.

'I've turned down at least tens of millions,' Newmark says. 'Who needs it? Like Jim likes to point out, we know some dotcom billionaires now. They have to travel with bodyguards - they have to ...' he trails off. 'Money is a burden, you know. Beyond a certain amount.'

Newmark used to tell people that the only thing missing in his life was a permanent parking space. But now, with his new house, he has one of those. 'So the only thing I've been lacking is a hummingbird feeder that actually works.'

Global success, for Craig and his list, has been a long time coming. The site was created more than a decade ago - making it practically prehistoric in internet terms - and for the first five years was used only in San Francisco. A Bay Area cult that spread through word of mouth, it began as a free digital noticeboard for anyone who wanted to sell a sofa, rent an apartment or browse singles ads. But gradually, through some combination of the crude utility of its design, the frankness and wit that characterised its postings, and the all-encompassing scope of its ad departments and discussion groups, it became more than that, encouraging a unique sense of community, trust and loyalty in its users. As sites were introduced to other US cities - first Boston, then Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and later another 196 throughout the country - Craigslist slowly became embedded in the public imagination.

By 2003, when a London Craigslist was launched - amid much lasciviously scandalised coverage of the site's no-strings sex 'Casual Encounters' section - it had become a genuine cultural phenomenon; in 2004 the documentary 24 Hours on Craigslist, depicting the people who used the site and what they were selling during one day in San Francisco, began doing the rounds of film festivals; the same year, the city council declared 10 October 'Craigslist Day'; by 2005 the site had spread to 30 countries around the world, and Time magazine named Newmark one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

As with eBay before it, the individual ads posted on Craigslist continue to be a high-profile source of quirky human interest stories, including the recent tale of the Canadian student who swapped a red paperclip for a series of ever-more-valuable items until, finally, he traded up to a house in Saskatchewan.

But the site has also been demonised by representatives of the 'old' media, who claim Craigslist threatens the very existence of the newspaper industry: in the US, classified ads are one of newspapers' most important sources of revenue and the nationwide spread of Craigslist's almost entirely free service is cutting into their margins. Based on the site's limited sources of income - they now charge for job and apartment listings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York - Craigslist was estimated to have made between $10m and $20m last year, but could have made 50 times that if its owners had wanted to. In 2004, industry newsletter Classified Intelligence Report suggested that Craigslist had taken $50m worth of business out of the Bay Area alone ('I didn't see any solid basis for that figure,' says Jim Buckmaster now); infamously, investment bank Goldman Sachs recently published a report in which Craigslist was described as 'a real menace' to the newspaper industry. Craig Newmark disagrees: 'Newspapers have much bigger issues: for example, loss of circulation, and loss of trust.'

Newmark certainly doesn't look like a man who might lay waste to a centuries-old industry. Short, bald, myopic and overweight, he embodies almost every creaking stereotype of the office-bound, gadget-obsessed computer nerd. He loves The Simpsons and Monty Python, crams the bookshelves of his home with neatly grouped sets of science fiction and pulp crime novels, and despite becoming a regular on guest lists of the fashionable and influential, remains painfully shy and socially maladroit. He struggles to make eye contact, has difficulty reading people and speaks hesitantly, pausing often over 'ah's and 'uh's; conversation with him can be a desolate landscape cratered with uncomfortable silences, which he fills by muttering 'Yeah ... yeah ...' quietly under his breath; he has an agonising sense of humour. Over the space of two months, I will meet him repeatedly - in a restaurant in Manhattan, in a cafe in San Francisco, at a cocktail party thrown by the actor Edward Norton; each time, I will hear him make the same joke: 'I have some advice for the people of London,' he intones cheerfully. 'Mind the gap!' This baffling non sequitur is always met with a tight, polite smile of incomprehension: it apparently only encourages him to try it again later.

'He makes me cringe when he's trying to be funny,' Newmark's girlfriend Eileen confesses one morning as the three of us travel together into downtown San Francisco. Eileen is a slim, pretty woman in her thirties who works at Gap's headquarters as a technical designer and takes a flamenco class every Wednesday night. Inspired by the way chat-show host David Letterman used to discuss his girlfriend on air, Newmark insists on referring to Eileen as 'The Girlfriend'; this infuriates her almost as much as his tendency to repeat the same weak would-be soundbites over and over again. 'He gives me identical lines that he'd give to a paper. I have to remind him that I'm not quoting him.' She turns to Newmark, and executes a convincing mime of rapping on an invisible wall that divides them. 'We struggle,' she says, 'with that.'

Craig Newmark likes to tell people that he's 'a nerd in recovery', but in truth it's been a very long convalescence. Although he was born into the analogue world of the Fifties, Newmark has spent almost his entire life working with computers. He was raised in New Jersey, where his mother was a book-keeper and his father a travelling salesman, variously peddling insurance, promotional pens and, for a while, wholesaling steak to butchers' shops; he died when Craig was 13. As a child, he wanted to be a palaeontologist, and then, when he was 11, a theoretical physicist: 'Because back then nuclear power was cool. But then I realised I wanted a job some day, and I started looking at computer sciences.'

In 1976, at 23, Newmark left university with two degrees in computer science and was immediately offered a job at IBM's giant IM Pei-designed campus complex outside Boca Raton, Florida. Personal computing was still in its infancy and IBM's mainframes were the standard equipment in business and industry: 'These were computers the size of refrigerators,' he says, 'and far less powerful than a PC.' In his spare time, Craig began to try to get out more; he signed up for a photography course, took up yoga and, most improbably, enrolled in a ballet class: 'I thought I'd meet interesting women,' he explains. 'There were only two other guys. Both, ah, gay.' The ballet didn't last long: 'I've never been athletic in my life ... I just ended up hurting myself, twice.' Doing stretching exercises on the barre, he suffered a painful strain; it was diagnosed as a hernia: 'When the doctor told me, I passed out and fractured my jaw.'

After six years, IBM moved Craig to a sales job in Detroit, where he worked for another decade. Out in the field, he began to develop his social skills - it was slow going, he says, despite the efforts of his managers. 'One did tell me that my sense of humour was my saving grace: it wasn't that funny, but I had a good sense of absurdity.'

Finally, after spending another year working in Pittsburgh, with the corporation undergoing 'some downsizing agonies', he gathered the nerve to quit. It was 1993: Craig Newmark was 40 years old, and had been at IBM for a total of 17 years. 'I should have, ah, left earlier,' he says. 'I was not, ah, smart enough.'

The global headquarters of Craigslist lies halfway down a shabby block in a suburban neighbourhood of San Francisco, in a dilapidated three-storey Victorian house sandwiched between a pizzeria and a down-on-its-luck gift shop optimistically christened Great Stuff. Although Newmark does much of his work from his home office - or from cafes, or from anywhere he can find a wireless signal for his laptop - most days he still spends a few hours in the cluttered, low-ceilinged upstairs room he shares here with Jim Buckmaster. Together, they resemble a stereotypical comedy duo - Buckmaster, 42, is the more relaxed, streetwise one of the pair, has a luxuriantly thick head of hair, and at a gangly 6ft 7in towers over the diminutive Newmark. 'Jim runs everything,' says Craig. 'And he does the stuff I'm terrible at - like hiring, and legal, financial stuff.'

Craig's business card describes him as 'Customer service rep and founder', and it is in the execution of customer service that he chooses to spend much of his time. Craigslist is an almost entirely self-policing community, in which users can negatively 'flag' postings they disapprove of: a certain number of flags, and the posting is automatically removed. And although the Craigslist offices house five full-time customer service employees, Craig likes to keep an eye on what's going on himself: to this end, any of the 10m people who use the world's 300 Craigslist sites every month can email him directly at craig@craigslist.org . He says people are often surprised to find correspondence from him showing up in their inboxes: some, because they've learned that other companies don't bother to reply to complaints; many simply never realised there was an actual Craig behind the List. He tries to respond to every message he receives. 'Every unanswered message is a loose end. And I dislike loose ends. I'm hoping that doesn't cross the line into obsessive/compulsive or anal-retentive behaviour.' In fact, Newmark checks his email constantly; while I'm with him, if prevented from doing so for more than an hour at a time, he becomes visibly distracted.

One morning in June, Newmark takes me to Reverie, the cafe where he regularly begins his day, where he first met Eileen - and where he feels sufficiently comfortable to help clearing tables, when the mood takes him. After half an hour reading the paper, he looks up anxiously: 'Unfortunately,' he says, 'I can sense the email building up'; it's time to go to the office. A few minutes later, Newmark is at his desk, addressing the first messages of the day. Once every week or so, the police, or the FBI, will call with a serious problem they've discovered on Craigslist - someone advertising crystal meth for sale; Ukrainian-based scammers selling computer equipment that doesn't exist; or, on one memorable occasion, an ad offering plutonium ('Someone got a rather stern talking to from their parents,' Newmark explains). But mostly it's the small stuff that takes the time. This morning: a woman in Washington alerting him to personal ads being posted by prostitutes in Seattle; from Dallas, a man asking Craig for help getting a response to an ad he's seen for an '87 Chevrolet he wants to buy; some harassment going on in the 'Kink, fetish' discussion group; in the weddings group, a discussion about engagement rings has been interrupted by a woman protesting that 'the bitches here don't care about blood diamonds!'

Newmark works to correct these problems, opening and closing the windows on his computer desktop with such speed that it's almost impossible to follow what he's doing: he moves between his email and the Craigslist administration tools with which he blocks ads and bans especially troublesome posters; looks up the Internet Protocol addresses of spam advertising postings, hunting for their point of origin; and writes avuncular emails to one man arguing in the pets discussion groups: 'Gabe, the bickering, as per below, is just not OK. Can

I trust you to chill?'; to another, he emails simply: 'I think I really need you to refrain from posting on our site. Thanks! Craig.'

'The customer service work, I do myself,' Newmark explains later, 'it's sometimes more effective if I tell a bad guy to cease, rather than someone he hasn't heard of.'

And surely, I suggest, he might also enjoy exercising control over something as enormous and protean as a community of 10m people?

'All I wanna do is just provide some guidance, and that's it. That's enough,' he says. 'We do have this idea of a moral compass, and now and again a little course correction doesn't hurt.'

Craig Newmark's customer service brief was much simpler in the beginning: back then, he knew everyone on Craigslist personally. After leaving IBM, Newmark had taken a programming job with the financial firm Charles Schwab, and moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco: 'I wanted to try a city with more intensity,' he says. In 1993, he moved over to more lucrative freelance-contracting work, and used his spare time to send out an email circular to friends in the city; a what's on listing for the Bay Area tech community, it included impending industry parties and regular events like Joe's Digital Diner, a communal meal at which, he explains, 'people would do storytelling using emerging digital technologies'. He kept adding events and names to his email list until, by mid-1995, he decided to turn it into listserv - an automated internet forum that could serve as many users as he liked. A listserv requires a name: Newmark was thinking of 'SF-events', but a fellow programmer persuaded him to use the shorthand by which everyone in the Bay Area already knew his mail-outs: Craig's List.

The site remained something he looked after in his spare time, but slowly became more complex; as the internet boom began to swell the Bay Area population and made rented accommodation harder to find, he asked Craigslist users to post news of apartments to let; later, he began taking job ads. Newmark worked on the list every day for an hour or two; whenever it began to take more than that, because a task had became too labour intensive, he'd write some new code to automate it a little more and save time. At the end of 1997, Craigslist reached its tipping point: with half-a-million page views a month, the site had come to the attention of Microsoft's local listings service Sidewalk.com, which asked to buy advertising space on the site. But Newmark, who wanted the site to continue as a genuine community service, unencumbered by the demands of capitalism - or irritating banner ads - refused. Instead, he turned Craigslist into a non-profit organisation; he consulted his users about how best to raise money to defray the running costs, and so began charging $25 each for job ads; he took on volunteers to maintain the site. But this experiment was not a success: 'It failed disastrously,' he says. After a year, he decided to turn Craigslist into a for-profit company, and began taking on fully paid staff. But that, too, began to go wrong; his inability to read people let him down: 'I made some bad hires,' he says. Newmark won't be specific; he says that California employment law limits what he can legally say. 'But I did hire a couple of people who just couldn't do the job. In some cases it didn't end particularly badly. In one case,' he adds darkly, 'it ended very badly.' Newmark realised he simply didn't have what it took to run his own company: 'Not tough enough,' he says.

But in May 1999, just before the dotcom bubble burst, Newmark hired Jim Buckmaster to help with the programming of the site. Buckmaster was the very embodiment of the anti-corporate values that Craigslist had come to represent: 'I'd been living the past 10 or 15 years in a countercultural way,' he says. 'In communal housing, only using a bicycle for transportation, grinding my own wheat to make bread - all that kind of stuff. So the uncommercial non-corporate aspects of it appealed to me.' He oversaw the expansion of the site into cities beyond San Francisco and introduced many of the self-service mechanisms that support it today; in 2000, he became CEO of Craigslist.

'I screwed up a couple of things really badly,' Newmark explains, 'which Jim has been really great about fixing.' One of the things Craig screwed up was ownership of the company: although he refuses to discuss the details of this, at some point after 1999, Newmark decided to break up the equity in the site he had created and - until that point - owned outright. To insure himself against the temptation to sell the whole company, becoming wealthy at the expense of the community he had created, he divided up shareholding in Craigslist between himself and some of the people who worked on it at the time. But in August 2004, the plan backfired when Philip Knowlton, a former employee ('When he left, he was in training regarding customer service,' Newmark explains. 'I won't elaborate on that') sold his 25 per cent stake in Craigslist to eBay for $15m. 'I should have listened to the lawyers more,' Newmark says.

When asked why he started Craigslist, Craig Newmark always says exactly the same thing: 'To give people a break.' He says he just wanted to provide help for those who needed it - to make it easier to find that cheap sofa, or that apartment, or that girl you exchanged glances with on the bus. He insists it is not an idealistic enterprise: 'Uh, no. I just regard it as treating other people like I wanna be treated. Idealistic to me means going beyond that - going to Africa to help deal with malaria, or HIV, or hunger. To me, this is just being a good guy. I decided to give back a little and I'm just following through on the thing I started 11 years ago - giving people a break.'

Buckmaster is pretty certain that Newmark has checked his Craigslist email every day of the week for the last six years; and although these days he travels a lot for work - to foreign conferences and speaking engagements - Newmark hasn't taken a holiday for eight or nine years. 'I think he'd find that disturbing in some way,' Buckmaster tells me. 'Certainly he's free to take a vacation - Craigslist will not come to a stop if he were to step away from the keyboard.' In the meantime, Newmark and the rest of the staff continue to receive fanmail from Craigslist users all over the world: 'People thank us for the site,' Newmark says, 'and specifically thank us for not selling out, and keeping it going.'

At the end of June, another 100 cities around the world were given their own Craigslists; foreign language sites will follow later this year (the romance languages first - Chinese will be a little more complicated). Craigslist remains a privately owned company, and Buckmaster won't be drawn on how much money it makes, or how the remaining 75 per cent of the equity is divided: 'There doesn't seem to be any advantage to disclosing any of those kind of details,' he says affably. But I do ask Newmark how high the offers for the site have climbed.

'Ask Jim, but he'll probably say we don't care. You can even look in some of the blogs recently: one guy thinks that somebody should just offer us a billion for the thing. And it's interesting to hear that number - but what would I do with hundreds of millions of dollars? I could buy a much bigger TV - but I can already do that.'

Newmark used to say that having Craigslist named after him was something he found slightly embarrassing. But during one of our last meetings, I ask him if he ever wishes he'd called it something else.

'No,' he says quickly. 'I'm happy with that, for a number of reasons - I do have a lot of pride of ownership; you know - it's something I did. And, ah, with my name on the thing, I take more personal responsibility. And that's good.'