Scroll Through This Quiz on Defunct Websites

Launched in 1997, SixDegrees.com is widely considered to be the first social networking site. It allowed users to create profiles, list their friends, and also search said list. Though these features existed on other sites before, Six Degrees was the first to combine them all into one network. The site attracted millions of users, but failed to become a sustainable business and closed in 2000.

Before buying the Dallas Mavericks and becoming part of the panel on "Shark Tank," tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban was an investor in the internet radio company Broadcast.com. Just four years after it was founded, Broadcast.com was purchased by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in 1999, making it the company's most expensive acquisition ever. However, the merger didn't go well, and Broadcast.com was shut down in 2002.

From 2001 until 2018, StumbleUpon helped users discover random websites with the click of a button. The site's simple interface and user-curated content helped propel it to become one of the most popular locations on the web by the early 2010s. However, competition from other social media sites was too stiff, and in 2018, StumbleUpon rebranded as Mix.com, with a similar concept, but a different format.

Shortly after attempting to purchase Friendster in 2004, Google launched its own social network, Orkut. Named for its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, the site had profiles and friends lists like most social media sites, and users could also add videos to their profiles from either YouTube or Google Video. Despite backing from its powerful parent company, Orkut only ever gained popularirty in Brazil and eventually shut down in 2014.

In November 1994, GeoCities, which offered users free memory to create and store simple websites, launched. The host quickly grew in traffic and by 1999, became the third most-visited website. That same year, GeoCities was sold to Yahoo! for more than $3.5 billion. However, as web hosting became less expensive, GeoCities was no longer as necessarry it had once been, and users began to decline. The site was closed down in 2009.

In 2003, Friendster launched and quickly became one of the internet's most popular early social networks, reaching more than 3 million users in just a few months. However, it wasn't able to continue its success for very long, with the rise of MySpace and Facebook. In 2009, Friendster was sold to a Malaysian company for $39.5 million and eventually relaunched as a social gaming site before finally collapsing for good in 2015.

In 1990, researchers from McGill University in Montreal, Canada launched Archie, the world's first internet search engine. Though it pales in comparison to the massive search engines of today, like Bing and Google, Archie paved the way by indexing a handful of interconnected files, and then users could search for those files using a few simple parameters. Work on Archie ended in the mid-'90s with the rise of Yahoo! and Google.

In 1993, Microsoft launched Encarta Multimedia Encyclopedia as a CD-ROM. Encarta grew and eventually became a subscription-based website in 1998, with 60,000 articles. However, with the rise of Wikipedia and other free sources of online information, Encarta became unprofitable and shut down at the end of 2009.

Launched in November 1998, Pets.com's popularity quickly skyrocketed, thanks, in large part, to its loveable sock puppet mascot. The character, who was voiced by comedian Michael Ian Black, quickly became part of modern culture, even appearing as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and in a Super Bowl commercial. Despite this, Pets.com lacked revenue and the company went bankrupt two years after launch.

In 1995, AltaVista was launched by the Digital Equipment Corporation, and by 2000, it was the most popular search engine on the web. However, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! gradually grew, AltaVista's popularity waned. In 2003, the company was purchased by Overture, which was in turn purchased by Yahoo!, who integrated AltaVista into its own search functionality.