eBay

Started in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, eBay has grown to become one of the world’s biggest online marketplaces and auction sites, and it’s probably the first place that springs to mind when you’re trying to get rid of a bunch of unwanted wedding presents.

At the beginning, it seems, AuctionWeb was owned by Omidyar’s consulting company Echo Bay Technologies. Echo Bay didn’t live on the echobay.com domain, because that was then owned by Echo Bay Mines.

From what we can see on the Internet Archive when ebay.com was first archived on June 14, 1997, AuctionWeb lived at ebay.com/aw, even though the ebay.com home page linked to nothing else.

In September 1997 this anomaly was corrected, and AuctionWeb took over the ebay.com homepage and was renamed to eBay.

According to a New York magazine profile of Omidyar, the ebay.com homepage not only linked to AuctionWeb, but also a blog-style post about Ebola.

Apparently, Jeff Skoll, the company’s first president order the Ebola page be removed, despite objections from Omidyar.