From Lycos to Ask Jeeves to Facebook: Tracking the 20 most popular web sites every year since 1996

[Commentary] We like to think of sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon as immutable -- parts of the web as it exists now and has always existed. This is not the case, however. Sixteen years ago, only Amazon among those sites was a popular site; it was the 16th most popular site on the web according to Media Metrix (which later was absorbed into comScore). Infoseek and Hotbot were more popular than Google. What’s interesting about this data is that, it’s pretty static.

[Bump writes about politics for The Fix]