Ebay, the king of auction sites. Making themselves synonomous with the word auction, they single handedly turned the collectibles business on its head. Before the internet took off and ebay became the standard selling site for individuals, people sold their warn out items, collectibles and antiques at special shows, in the newspaper and localized classified papers. Things that were once hard to find and seemingly worth big dollars were cut to the knees when people saw a cross section of the availability of the items that had higher price tags before ebay took off. A collectible item that someone in one place was willing to part with seemed like a great find, but now compared with how many there are worldwide and how many owners are willing to part with them, the prices of these once great finds have became a simple thing to collect. Version Tracker showed true ingenuity. It started for the computer savvy, looking for software titles or driver updates. Beginning as an AOL member home page to give direct links to software companies' update pages, they became the huge success they are today. They have branched from the Mac only updates they offered, to now helping the windows users. Version Tracker makes the difficult easy. Instead of clicking through impossible software and hardware driver updates, with one simple search you get right to the page you were looking for. Download the driver, patch, or software and go on your merry way. Now the computer users who know about this true web success story can look for any software title or software or driver update from their site. It has modularized searching for software for any Mac or PC user. Snopes became more and more well known by more and more people sending bogus information through email. Urban and virtual legends were debunked by Snopes, similar to the show Myth Busters. Anytime a questionable piece of information floated through the information super highway, more and more people had learned of snopes and people would say snopes.com as an answer to any wild sounding claim. Their tenacity paid off when viewers and listeners would refer television and radio people to Snopes. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh both had a reaction wondering what snopes is, and felt that of course this goofy sounding thing couldn't have any worth to it. Both returned touting that snopes did reliable investigation and that this once unheard of website was doing the job that their staff would do. Fark doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it is one of many sites that want to point out strange or humorous real news items. Like any site, they started small, but now have users continually alerting them to news from around the world that fits their niche. The Smoking Gun used old fashioned reporter tactics, getting information that is public information, such as arrests, marriage licenses, etc and posted them on their website. Some sites wanting to revel over the Michael Jackson case, or felons on American Idol didn't want to spend time investigating information to write their opinion editorial, so they would point to the Smoking Gun as their source or reference with such events to focus on their opinion. It even reached the mainstream media outlets on television and radio, pointing out the Smoking Gun as breaking a story or to find the mug shot, etc. Amazon wasn't the first, but is by far the most successful at bringing commission based affiliates on board. Getting the word out to web designers that they could get a percentage of a sale referred by a site to sell one of their books, had thousands of people placing banners and badges on their sites hoping that the pennies would add up. In return, Amazon got branded all over the place with free advertising and the advertising they paid for was only when they made a sale, becoming a win/win situation for the book seller. So many other affiliates have followed, but none that match their success with bringing a no named company to a household word from the brilliance of their effective use of their affiliate program. Sick of being Screwed is an honorable mention, not for what they are, but for what they were. Sick of being Screwed is starting from scratch, but with all the big gun complaint and customer reporting sites fading away and the past success of the Sick of being Screwed team, we foresee them becoming the top of the web in customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) sites. Some early flash designers got noticed. When Macromedia's Flash started hitting websites, getting a lift by Macromedia taking the aquisition from the dying Future Splash attempts, many designers were having 3d circles floating around and not being terribly creative with this new media that no one knew quite how to deal with yet. Well Gabocorp quickly became known as the flash designer, showing such creativity and opening so many other people's eyes to what you could do with flash. They got to the point where they were not taking on new jobs and now seem to be going in another direction completely. Another site that followed behind Gabocorp was eye4u, which unlike Gabocorp, eye4u.com got so much attention from their site, they haven't changed it in years. Search Tech Vendors is a database of computer, software and internet company vendors. So many companies over the years would hide their phone numbers or websites that didn't have their company name as a .com, Tech Vendor Search boasts over 5000 vendors to be looked up to find the company's phone number and web address. Similar to Version Tracker's cutting through the nonsense to find drivers and updates through a forest of websites, Tech Vendor Search focuses on the comapnies' phone numbers and website addresses. Way Back Machine is the back up of the internet. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is true. You can search for web addresses and find different spots they were backed up and there is a cached copy of old versions of the websites you search for to see the transformation they have gone through to their current site. Just not to leave them out, Yahoo and Google each pioneered their piece of the web. Yahoo wasn't exactly eye candy, but they took their search engine success and parlayed it into a magazine and into every single web community and mass web service they could come up with and used their brand to do it. Over the years they have smoothed out the same simple look, but have kept it simple. Google revolutionized the search engine industry with their quick search results and powerful spidering capabilities. They are now known as the web search people, with remarks on television to Google it. Google anything and find it on the internet.