The UK's top five most popular websites we can't bear to be without

Nominet, the company behind the .uk domain, has revealed the top five sites that Brits consider essential.

By Dave Lancaster |

12:10 13 March 2014

Nominet has revealed the top five websites we can't live without in a poll which was commissioned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the internet.

Lesley Cowley, chief executive of Nominet, stated: "The web is such an integral part of everyday life that we simply can't live without it.

"It has changed to something beyond what even Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues could have imagined 25 years ago, when they were looking for an easier way to share and structure information.

"The social, political and economic impact of the web makes it a story we are all part of, and to which we all contribute daily, whether that's finding the answer to a question or connecting with friends and colleagues."

Facebook topped the list of websites with the BBC in at number two. Interestingly, 32% of women placed the social network giant first while 26% of men went for the BBC as number one instead.

A quarter said that they use the internet for finding and keeping in touch with friends, while 24% said they used the web to read up on something that was worrying them. Nearly half (46%) said the greatest aspect of the internet was its usage in answering questions.

Top five favourite websites:

    Facebook 25%
    BBC 20%
    Amazon 9%
    Gmail 5%
    Yahoo 5%

Of course, a lot has changed since the early days. Read on for some internet history and contemporary debate:

Back on March 12th 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee was working away at the Swiss physics laboratory Cern whereby he submitted a technical paper that outlined his blueprint for the world wide web presented a technical paper with the blueprint for the web. His vision was that of files shared via clickable links across a massive network regardles of your computer operating system.

Four years later Marc Andreessen created the first web browser - Mosaic - in 1993. Search engines like Google took hold that same decade and before we knew it, the world much wider than we ever dreamed of.

So much so that Berners-Lee has now called for a 'bill of rights' to protect its users from government surveillance and other modern day communication traits that could become a downtrodding force on web users.

Berners-Lee believes that we are at an internet crossroads, telling BBC Breakfast: "It's time for us to make a big communal decision. In front of us are two roads - which way are we going to go?

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?

"Or are we going to set up a bunch of values? Are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?"