Ask Jeeves
The search engine with a cartoon butler you asked full questions in plain English. Type "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" and Jeeves would fetch the answer — a friendlier face on the early web.
#Old Web
11 items
Blingee
Upload a photo, bury it in animated glitter, sparkles, blooming roses and possibly a dancing Snoop Dogg, and post the result to your MySpace. Blingee was the free GIF maker behind the most gloriously over-decorated images of the 2000s web — and when it announced its own death in 2015, its fans talked it out of dying.
eBaum's World
The early-2000s comedy and media dump every kid browsed instead of doing homework. Flash cartoons, prank-call soundboards, funny clips, and simple games — all stamped with the site's inescapable watermark, which became the running joke and the scandal at once.
Hot or Not
Upload your photo, get rated 1 to 10 by strangers, then rate a few hundred strangers yourself. Hot or Not was the web's first great time-waster of the 2000s — almost two million page views a day within a week of launch — and the founders of YouTube have said their site started out as an attempt to do the same thing with video.
ICQ
The pioneering instant messenger with the green-flower icon, the random UIN number, and the unmistakable "Uh oh!" message alert. Launched in 1996, ICQ basically invented consumer IM before AIM and MSN took over.
Lycos
The wolf-spider-named search engine with the eager black Labrador that would 'Go Get It!' One of the first search giants — briefly bigger than Yahoo — and one of the great cautionary tales of the dot-com bubble.
MapQuest
Before your phone knew where you were, you printed directions from MapQuest and prayed you didn't miss step 14. The pre-GPS road-trip ritual, in a stack of warm printer paper.
MSN Gaming Zone
For a lot of people, the first place you ever played games against strangers over the internet — dial in, drop into a lobby, and play Hearts, Spades, or Age of Empires. Microsoft's online-gaming portal, and a quiet ancestor of Xbox Live.
Netscape Navigator
The browser with the shooting-star "N" and the throbbing loading icon that, for millions, simply was the early web. Netscape dominated the mid-1990s before losing the browser war to Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer.
Yahooligans!
The internet with the training wheels on. Yahooligans! was Yahoo's walled garden for kids — a hand-picked web directory where every single link had been screened by an actual former teacher, which is why it was the only homepage your school's computer lab allowed.
Zwinky
Dress up a big-headed cartoon version of yourself, paste it on your MySpace, then wander Zwinktopia earning Zbucks for new outfits. Zwinky was the avatar craze of the mid-2000s — and, thanks to the browser toolbar it came bundled with, the thing that got a lot of family computers a stern talking-to.