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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
A computational knowledge engine
Launched in May 2009, Wolfram|Alpha answered questions by computing rather than searching: type a maths problem, a date, or two cities and it returned calculated results. In 2010 it was the site...
Questions answered by people who were there
Quora opened to the public in June 2010, founded by two former Facebook engineers. Its promise was answers from people with first-hand knowledge, and in 2010 Silicon Valley insiders answered...
Microsoft's one-year-old "decision engine"
Bing had launched in June 2009 with a photographic homepage and a marketing budget that called it a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. In 2010 it took over powering Yahoo's search...
China's search engine, after Google walked away
Baidu was already the dominant search engine in China when Google stopped censoring google.cn in March 2010 and redirected users to Hong Kong. Baidu's share of Chinese searches climbed past three...
The fast newcomer with tabs on top and one box for everything
Chrome went from about 5 percent of worldwide browser usage at the start of 2010 to roughly 15 percent by December. Version 4 added extensions in January, version 5 in May was the first stable...
Reader mode and extensions, in brushed aluminium
Safari 5, released on 7 June 2010 for Mac and Windows, added Reader (a clean article view), extensions, Bing as a search option and a faster Nitro JavaScript engine. On the Mac it was the default, on...
Small share, big ideas: Turbo, Speed Dial and tab stacking
Opera had only around 2 percent of desktop browser usage in 2010 but kept inventing features others copied: Speed Dial, mouse gestures, Opera Turbo compression, and, in Opera 11 in December, tab...
The default browser of Windows 7 and roughly a third of the web
Internet Explorer 8, bundled with Windows 7, was the single most-used browser version of 2010. It had tabs, a separate search box beside the address bar, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and a...
The alternative browser with a thousand extensions
Firefox 3.6, released on 21 January 2010, was the browser of choice for people who cared, with about 30 percent of worldwide usage. It added Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster...
Yahoo, Google, Ask, AVG, MyWebSearch... stacked five deep
Toolbars were the plague of the 2010 browser: bundled with Java updates, antivirus software and free downloads, they stacked below the address bar until the page was a slit. The Ask Toolbar, Google...
The first pop star made by YouTube and Twitter
Justin Bieber, discovered on YouTube in 2008, became the biggest teen star in the world in 2010. Beliebers organised on Twitter, where a Twitter engineer said Bieber accounted for a noticeable share...
The blog that became a newspaper
The Huffington Post mixed aggregated news, celebrity bloggers and huge headlines into the busiest news blog of 2010, with comment sections in the thousands. Its traffic and Facebook-savvy strategy...
The question-and-answer site founded by two ex-Facebook engineers ended its invite-only beta, promising answers from people with first-hand knowledge.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Gizmodo paid $5,000 for an iPhone prototype an Apple engineer left in a bar and published photos and a teardown two months before the launch; police later raided an editor's home.
Apple released Safari 5 with a Reader mode for articles, an extensions system and a faster JavaScript engine.
