This site shut down a long time ago. The early part of the Internet saw growth among universities and government agencies and in 1993 there were only 623 sites. In fact, there was no need for “BackRub” at that time, as local searches would suffice. Confused by the terminology “ BackRub”.

You might better recognize the name of the search engine, started by two Stanford students in 1996, after its name change, to “Google”

But since its humble beginning, the web has now grown from a mere 623 sites in 1993 to more than 162 million websites today. If they add blogs to this list, the numbers are astronomical. Now you can find almost anything and everything on the Web, from shopping to social networking, to banking, to news, and much more.

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/: named after a Welsh Village, claims to be the world’s longest domain name. The shortest is a open to a little more debate.

Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn. Interestingly, "g.com," along with most other single-letter and single-digit domain names are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The IANA is the master arbiter of domain names and addresses on the Internet. There are a few one-letter domain names out there, though: Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal. There was a proposal floated a few years ago to auction off the one-letter domain names, but nothing has come of it.

Imagine life without the Web now?