Top 20 Most Popular Websites In The World

Have you ever wondered what are the biggest and most popular websites in the world?

Google you might say? Facebook definitely. YouTube must be pretty high up there. You would be right with those three, but what comes next? Are there any news sites in the Top 20? Or is it just all about shopping and social networking?

What about computing; Microsoft or Apple? Or those notorious porn sites? They say that the most popular activity on the Internet is porn. What are the topics that get people to log on?  Is it the news, entertainment or sports? The list of the 20 most popular websites should give you the answer.

Here are the top 20 world’s biggest websites:

1. Google –  Enables users to search the world’s information, including webpages, images, and videos. Offers unique features and search technology.

2. Facebook – A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos.

3. YouTube – YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!

4. Yahoo! –  A major internet portal and service provider offering search results, customizable content, chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.

5. Blogger – Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP. (Owned by Google)

6. Baidu –  The leading Chinese language search engine, provides “simple and reliable” search experience, strong in Chinese language and multi-media content including MP3 music and movies, the first to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search in China.

7. Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using wiki software. (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License).

8. Windows Live – Search engine from Microsoft.

9. Twitter – Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

10. QQ –  China’s largest and most used Internet service portal owned by Tencent Inc. founded in 1998. There are currently over 640 million QQ user accounts making it one of the largest online communities in the world .

11. MSN – Portal for shopping, news and money, e-mail, search, and chat.

12. Yahoo! Japan – Japanese version of popular portal site.

13. LinkedIn – A networking tool to find connections to recommended job candidates,  industry experts and business partners. Allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business.

14. Google India – Indian version of this popular search engine. Search the whole web or only webpages from India.Interfaces offered in English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil.

15. Sina –  Sina is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal. It is run by SINA Corporation founded in 1999 in mainland China. Sina’s global financial headquarters have been based in Shanghai since October 2001.

16. Amazon –  Amazon seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.

17. Taobao – Taobao is a Chinese web site for online shopping, similar to eBay, Rakuten and Amazon, operated in the People’s Republic of China by the Alibaba Group.

18. WordPress – Free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, automatic spam protection and other features.

19. Google Hong Kong – Google search engine based in Hong Kong.

20. Google Deutchsland – Google search engine based in Germany.

Bubbling under at 21. eBay – International person to person auction site, with products sorted into categories.

It is information that people want. Google is the biggest and most used website in world. In fact Google search engines occupy a total of four positions on the top 20.

Information, shopping and social networking, that’s what we do on the web. More than half  of the websites in the Top 20 are devoted to information services. Four websites (Facebook, Twitter, QQ and LinkedIn) are used for social interaction and the rest for shopping.

Ok. Where are the other big companies and their website then? Other interesting results include Microsoft at position 28 and Apple at 34 respectively. Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing sits surprisingly high at position 24 as it went online only 2 years ago in 2009. The popular professional blogging platform WordPress.org (this blog is also done in WP) comes in at no. 70. This is not the same as WordPress.com which is at no. 18. The first newspaper to enter the list is the New York Times at no. 89.  Los Angeles Times is way back at no. 329 and Washington Post at 349 . The first porn website, Livejasmin comes in surprisingly low at no. 49 and it’s biggest competitor Pornhub is found only at position 65. Who thought porn would the number one activity on the web?

MySpace used to be the biggest social networking site until Facebook came along. It is still hanging in the Top 100 positioned currently at no. 91. Bank Of America is the first bank to enter the list at 149. CNN Interactive is the world’s most popular news website at 53. The handy and very useful currency converter XE is at 326. At no. 348 we have Elance, which is  the world’s leading platform for online employment. SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations is at 252. Two of world’s biggest affiliate marketing websites ClickBank and Commission Junction are at 209 and 265 respectively. Seth Godin’s cool Squidoo is at position 219. Squidoo is a free service that allows anyone to post a lens (mini website) on just about any topic.

Google and Facebook share the top two spots in most of the countries in the world. There are only a few exceptions one of them being Seznam, which means a list in English. Seznam is the most visited web portal in the Czech Republic, founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukačovič in Prague.

Oh, and where’s my favourite band? The Rolling Stones is sitting at no. 171,297. Hmm, maybe I should start listening to something new.

This list is based on the data gathered by Alexa, the Web Information Company. The websites are ordered by their 1 month Alexa traffic rank. The 1 month rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked #1. The definitions of the top 20 websites are written by their respective webmasters and/or wikipedia.

Comments are closed.