Defunct websites

ICQ was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client founded in June 1996 by Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and Arik's father, Yossi Vardi. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.

Omegle ( ) was a free, web-based online chat service that allowed users to socialize with others without the need to register. The service randomly paired users in one-on-one chat sessions where they could chat anonymously. It operated from 2009 to 2023.

Megaupload Ltd was a Hong Kong–based online company established in 2005 that operated from 2005 to 2012 providing online services related to file storage and viewing.

GameSpy was an American provider of online multiplayer and matchmaking middleware for video games founded in 1995 by Mark Surfas. After the release of a multiplayer server browser for Quake, QSpy, Surfas licensed the software under the GameSpy brand to other video game publishers through a newly established company, GameSpy Industries, which also incorporated his Planet Network of video game news and information websites, and GameSpy.com.

Panoramio was a geo-located tagging, photo sharing mashup active between 2005 and 2016. Photos uploaded to the site were accessible as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps. The site's goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users had taken at that location. Panoramio was acquired by Google in 2007. In 2009 the website was among the 1000 most popular websites worldwide.

RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidSh

iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) was a customizable Ajax-based start page or personal web portal launched by Google in May 2005. It was discontinued on November 1, 2013, because the company believed the need for it had eroded over time.

GameTrailers (GT) was an American video gaming website created by Geoffrey R. Grotz and Brandon Jones in 2002. The website specialized in multimedia content, including trailers and gameplay footage of upcoming and recently released video games, as well as an array of original video content focusing on video games, including reviews, countdown shows, and other web series.

online question and answer forum owned by Yahoo!

goatse.cx ( , ; "goat sex"), often spelled without the .cx top-level domain as Goatse, is an internet domain that originally housed an Internet shock site. Its front page featured a picture entitled , showing an image of a hunched-over naked man using both hands to stretch open his anus and present his red rectum lit by the camera flash, revealing his anal canal.

Emporis was a real estate data mining company with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. The company collected data and photographs of buildings worldwide, which were published in an online database from 2000 to September 2022.

Hong Kong news media

website (2002-2006)

shock site

123Movies, GoMovies, GoStream, MeMovies or 123movieshub was a network of file streaming websites operating from Vietnam which allowed users to watch films for free. It was called the world's "most popular illegal site" by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in March 2018, before being shut down a few weeks later on foot of a criminal investigation by the Vietnamese authorities.

predecessor of the webcam

Rotten.com was an American photographic sharing shock site, promoting morbid curiosity and death, active from 1996 to 2012, known for hosting macabre images of blood and gore, death and decomposition, and graphic violence. Founded in 1996, it was run by a developer known as Soylent Communications. Site updates slowed in 2009, with the final update in February 2012. The website's front page was last archived in February 2018.

Online research library.

database provided by Google containing various types of content

BrowserChoice.eu was a website created by Microsoft in March 2010 following a decision in Microsoft Corp. v. European Commission. The case involved legal proceedings by the European Union against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used this dominance to create a similar market position in the web browser market. The BrowserChoice.eu website was created to allow users that had not made, or were unaware of, a choice to try other browsers, and thus comply with the European Commission's ruling.

TeamXbox was a gaming media web site dedicated to Microsoft's Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One platforms. While most of the content was Xbox and Xbox 360 related, the site occasionally covered general technology and other video game news.

Freecode, formerly Freshmeat, was a website owned by BIZX, Inc., hosting mainly open-source software for programmers and developers. Among other things, the site also hosted user reviews and discussions. While a majority of the software covered is open source for Unix-like systems, Freecode also covered releases of closed-source, commercial and cross-platform software on and handhelds. Freecode was notable for its age, having started in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator of software releases.

Wiser.org, formerly WiserEarth.org, was a user-generated online community space for the social and environmental movement. As one of the social networks for environmental sustainability and social change, Wiser.org was the primary initiative of the non-profit organization WiserEarth, which tracks the work of non-profits around the world. The site mapped and connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, governments, groups, and individuals addressing global issues such as climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights, a

Gawker was an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers that was based in New York City and focused on celebrities and the media industry. According to SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month in 2015. Founded in 2002, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.

GirlsDoPorn was an American pornographic website active from 2009 to 2020. In October and November 2019, six people involved with the website were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. In December 2019, two more individuals were charged with obstruction of sex trafficking enforcement. The website was removed in January 2020 after 22 victims won the civil case against the company. According to the United States Department of Justice, the website and its sister website GirlsDoToys generated over $17 million in revenue. Videos were featured on GirlsDoPorn.com as

Stage6 was a video sharing website owned and operated by DivX, Inc., where users could upload, share, and view video clips. Stage6 was different from other video services in that it streamed high quality video clips that were user-encoded with DivX and Xvid video codecs.

Legacy Social-Networking service provided by MSN

Lexico was a dictionary website that provided a collection of English and Spanish dictionaries produced by Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishing house of the University of Oxford. While the dictionary content on Lexico came from OUP, this website was operated by Dictionary.com, whose eponymous website hosts dictionaries by other publishers such as Random House. The website was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com on 26 August 2022.

KissAnime was an anime-focused file streaming website that hosted links and embedded videos, allowing users to stream or download movies and TV shows for free in violation of copyright laws. It was a sister site to the manga viewing website, KissManga. KissAnime was described as "one of the world’s biggest streaming anime websites".

AddThis was a free social bookmarking service that could be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget. Once the widget was added, visitors of a website using the service could bookmark or share an item using a variety of services, such as Facebook, MySpace, Pinterest, and Twitter. AddThis collected users' behavioural data, even if they do not share anything. The site reached 1.9 billion unique visitors monthly and was used by more than 15 million web publishers. The service operated under companies including AddThis, Inc., AddThis, LLC, and Clearspring Technologies, Inc. until the

chess24.com was an Internet chess server in English and ten other languages, established in 2014 by German grandmaster Jan Gustafsson and Enrique Guzman. Chess24 also provided live coverage of major international chess tournaments, and hosted their own online tournaments, including the Magnus Carlsen Invitational.

LBRY (pronounced "library") is a blockchain-based file-sharing and payment network that is primarily used for social networks and video platforms.

Presseurop was a multilingual Paris-based news portal that translated and published Europe-related news articles daily from over two hundred sources into ten European languages, including English. It was funded by the European Commission and was launched in 2009 by the French newspaper Courrier International, the Portuguese newspaper Courrier Internacional, the Polish newspaper Forum, and the Italian newspaper Internazionale.

former academic search engine

Klout was a website and mobile app that used social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which was a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measured the size of a user's social media network and correlated the content created to measure how other users interact with that content. Klout launched in 2008.

electronics distributor

Susning.nu (in English literally meaning "") was a Swedish language wiki website created by Lars Aronsson (also the founder of Project Runeberg) in 2001 and active until 2009. In its first three years, the website ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit. Susning did not have a pronounced ambition and could be compared in scope to Everything2; Aronsson's stated original aim for Susning was "to make it into whatever the users want it to be". As such, Susning was an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a discussion forum about any concept of interest to its users. Because of this, Susning grew and

FunOrb was a casual gaming site created by Jagex. Launched on 27 February 2008, and closed on 7 August 2018, it was the company's first major release after their successful MMORPG, RuneScape. All of the games were programmed in Java.

Boo.com was a short-lived British e-commerce business, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarded as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe by the investors because they had created an online bookstore named Bokus.com, the third largest book e-retailer (in 1997), before founding boo.com.

news website

Veropedia was a free, advertising-supported online encyclopedia launched in 2007. Veropedia editors chose Wikipedia articles that met the site's reliability standards; information was then scraped, or chosen by an automatic process, and thereafter a stable version of the article was posted on Veropedia. Any improvements required for articles to reach a standard suitable for Veropedia had to be done on Wikipedia itself. This model was intended to improve the quality of both projects.

TVShowsOnDVD.com was a website dedicated to cataloging, campaigning for, and reporting news about Region 1 television series releases on DVD and region A Blu-ray. The site's slogan asked: "Is YOUR Favorite Show On DVD?".

PureVolume (formerly Unborn Media) was a website for uploading and streaming of music files, the first independently run of its type. PureVolume was created by Unborn Media, Inc; Mitchell Pavao; Brett Woitunski; and Nate Hudson, all from the University of Massachusetts.

ABCnews.com.co was a fake news website which mimicked the URL, design and logo of the ABC News website. Many stories from ABCnews.com.co were widely shared before being debunked.

Defunct american gaming website

formerly known as live.com

Ogrish.com was a shock site that presented uncensored news coverage and multimedia material based for the most part on war and war crimes, industrial/machinery accidents, and executions.

website

Computer software

Typepad was a blogging service owned by Endurance International Group, previously owned by SAY Media (from the merger of Six Apart and VideoEgg). In August 2025, the site announced it would shut down in September of that year.

thumb|Webvan Webvan was a dot-com company and grocery business that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after three years of operation. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US areas: the San Francisco Bay Area; Dallas; Sacramento; San Diego; Los Angeles; Orange County, California; Chicago; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Atlanta, Georgia. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities by 2001.

Langmaker is a website run by Jeffrey Henning that acts as a database of conlangs, neographies, and other resources related to conlanging and conworlding. Prominent articles and the conlang directory were collected published by Yannia Press as Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, with an introduction by David J. Peterson. As of June 4, 2009, the site was offline. An unknown source took control of the website, hosting malware. After the takeover of the website, the owner regained control in 2022 making the site available through a Tor network endpoint until 2023.

ALTT, formerly ALTBalaji, was an Indian subscription based video on demand platform and a wholly owned subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms. Launched on 16 April 2017, ALTBalaji became Balaji Telefilms' foray into the digital entertainment sphere to create original OTT content.

grid.org was a website and online community established in 2001 for cluster computing and grid computing software users. For six years it operated several different volunteer computing projects that allowed members to donate their spare computer cycles to worthwhile causes. In 2007, it became a community for open source cluster and grid computing software. After around 2010 it redirected to other sites.

Turkish-language edition of Al Jazeera

Foinse (; Irish for "Source") was an Irish-language newspaper in Ireland. It was first published October 1996 and had both print and online editions until September 2013 when its publisher, Móinéar Teo, announced that it would become online only from that month. The Foinse website continued to be active until 2015 when it was shut down.

defunct pornographic website

Venere.com was a website focusing on online hotel reservations. Its listing included various types of accommodation. Venere.com started in the year 1994 as Venere Net Srl, an online travel agency based in Rome, Italy. In 2008, it was acquired by Expedia Group. The president of the company was Johan Svanstrom.

Hong Kong news media