Best of the Web

Okay, so we're not the first to publish an article with this title. News magazines, finance magazines, family magazines--everybody's gotten into the act. Even your local newspaper has probably ventured to pick the Best of the Web. But how many of these articles have really said which site is the Web's very best? Call us crazy, but we're gonna do it. We won't ruin the surprise--skim ahead if you must--but in this article, we name the single best site on all the Web. Along the way, we pit dozens of great sites against each other and name our favorites in 32 categories, including news, sports, travel, music, and lots of tech-related areas.

We began our search by dividing sites into four general classes: e-commerce, information, services, and recreation. We subdivided each of these sections into 8 categories, from auctions to Webmaster tools, and picked the 2 best sites in each of these 32 categories. That adds up to 64 outstanding sites, which we went on to rate on four criteria that apply to any Web site:

• Ease of use: How good are the site's navigation tools? Is it easy to find stuff? Fancy features aren't of much use if a site is a chore to navigate.
  
  
• Breadth of content: If it's a news site, does it cover everything you'd expect a news site to cover? Sites that are one-trick ponies may suffer here.
  
  
• Usefulness versus the Real World: Is a given search engine a better way of finding data in a sea of sources than, say, your local library's card catalog? Is Homestead a better way of sharing information with friends and family than photos, letters, and phone calls?
  
  
• Gee-whiz factor: Does the site do something interesting and new? Before EBay, for example, who would have thought that a Web site could be used to auction off unwanted knick-knacks to bidders around the world?
  
  

Using these criteria, editors named a winner in each category. We took those 32 winners and threw them into a tournament draw. A fresh panel of editors then picked their favorites, based on the same four criteria.

In the end, we narrowed 64 of the finest sites on the Web down to one winner. But enough with the nuts and bolts. Read on and follow our quest for the Best of the Web.