  Since the inception of the first web page three decades back, the Web has
evolved considerably, from static HTML pages in the beginning to the dynamic
web pages of today, from mainly the text-based pages of the 1990s to today's
multimedia rich pages, etc. Although much of this is known anecdotally, to our
knowledge, there is no quantitative documentation of the extent and timing of
these changes. This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature by
looking at the top 100 Alexa websites for over 25 years from the Internet
Archive or the "Wayback Machine", archive.org. We study the changes in
popularity, from Geocities and Yahoo! in the mid-to-late 1990s to the likes of
Google, Facebook, and Tiktok of today. We also look at different categories of
websites and their popularity over the years and find evidence for the decline
in popularity of news and education-related websites, which have been replaced
by streaming media and social networking sites. We explore the emergence and
relative prevalence of different MIME-types (text vs. image vs. video vs.
javascript and json) and study whether the use of text on the Internet is
declining.
