20 most popular web sites since 1996

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 (the CEO of which owns The Post) 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 (which, that December, looked like this) and Facebook (which didn’t exist).

Sites like AOL and Yahoo did exist — and were popular. But the easiest way to make that point is to share with you this graphic, which shows the 20 most popular sites in December of each year, according to comScore. More interestingly, what it shows is when certain sites became and then stopped being popular.


The 2014 Word Of The Year

A nation, a workplace, an ethnicity, a passion, an outsized personality. The people who comprise these things, who fawn or rail against them, are behind Merriam-Webster's 2014 word of the year: 

Culture


Culture is a big word at back-to-school time each year, but this year lookups extended beyond the academic calendar. The term conveys a kind of academic attention to systematic behavior and allows us to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group: we speak of a "culture of transparency" or "consumer culture." Culture can be either very broad (as in "celebrity culture" or "winning culture") or very specific (as in "test-prep culture" or "marching band culture").
This year, the use of the word culture to define ideas in this way has moved from the classroom syllabus to the conversation at large, appearing in headlines and analyses across a wide swath of topics.

Winter break hours


The library will be closed from December 19 to January 4. Students will be able to clear fines and fees, and remove Banner blocks from January 5 to 9, 10 AM to 2 PM. UHMC Library will resume normal hours January 12.

Christmas and Winter Festival Traditions

Why do the Japanese celebrate Christmas with KFC? What is Christmas pudding? Who is Baba Chaghaloo? Why do Italians have huge Christmas parties? What do Hanukkah and Christmas have in common? The answers to these and more questions are at WhyChristmas.