In 1985, the domain name .com came into existence, helping to define the modern Internet. Within two years of the registration of the first Internet domain name, major tech corporations such as Intel (Intel.com), Xerox (xerox.com), and Apple (apple.com), along with a host of smaller outfits, had all begun to make their mark on the World Wide Web. Their presence helped give birth to everything from search engines (Google, etc.) to social networks (Facebook, etc.) to a wide variety of online services in the commercial, altruistic, and just-plain-weird realms or sometimes all three at once (were looking at you, Craigslist). The following Websites represent some of the biggest successes, along with some of the most spectacular failures, of the past 25 years. For millions of users, some of these Websites will seem like old and long-gone friends; others continue to dominate the Internet to this day.
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