As part of its 10th birthday celebration, Google has opened the doors to an antiquated version of its search engine that dates back to 2001. The portal has all the trimmings from the old site, including the goofy logo (complete with exclamation point), a missing “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and the not-so-modest claim of having indexed 1,326,920,000 web pages.
It’s cool to see things the way they were (though they haven’t changed all that much), but the real fun lies in running a few searches. Google’s blog post offers a few examples: The iPod referred to a Document Processing System, and YouTube gets zero hits.
And most humbling: a search for TechCrunch yields a single link to a now-defunct learning website.
Because so much of the web has changed since 2001, Google is also including links to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which includes cached copies of pages from that time period. Google says that the site will remain open for one month – after that, it’s history.
Very funny!
2001 was a great year for tech! Thanks for bringing back such great memories Google!!!
Peter
http://www.thewebwar.com
Searching on Web 2.0 brings up a link to Netscape…ha!
This is great. I wish they would keep it online permanently!
Google has changed it’s moral values !
In 2001, “sex” returns a #1 result for “safersex.org”. And NOW? Welcome to Pornhub.com!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist to but to make that search.
—Schwabe
There is nothing moral about sex. Talking about moral values and sex is like chasing unicorn.
a lot has changed in 7 years LOL.
I’m with Brady – They should keep this forever!
An interesting point – a search for blog in the 2001 search – 76,400 results. Now – 3,760,000,000
Some interesting back-googling:
2001 Google returns 158,000 results for “john mccain”, 671 for “barack obama”, 0 for “sarah palin”, and 3,240 for “joe biden”.
In 2008 the same queries return, respectively: 65,000,000; 74,200,000; 18,700,000; 13,000,000.
Funny to put in “Youtube” and get “No Results”…
#1 hit for “twin towers” is a retirement home.
What a great way to put things into perspective! One forgets there was a time when Google was just a Startup with just great fast searching. They sure have come a long way!
Thanks for this post.
Cheers – Eric
Wow, this is quite interesting as it pre-dates my name change & reveals that I am in fact not the only Jayphen on the internet. Someone with the name ‘Jasmine Stephanie’ uses Jayphen as her nickname.
i put olympics 2008 and got a completely different set
Awesome. That’s such a great idea.
Has anyone been able to load any of the cached pages by clicking on “View old version on the Internet Archive”
Doesn’t work for me.
Try wikipedia. OMG.
“Welcome, o ye five initial members of wikipedia..”
Wow. The world before 9/11. Incredible. Try searching
Too bad they didn’t make the cached content available, since most of the Internet Archive links don’t work.
Wow, even though this is pretty cool stuff, makes you wonder why they blow so much money storing all this old data for so long. I wonder how much it costs them to keep this stuff around and what kind of return they get by keeping it. One good thing is that if there is a massive ad revenue slowdown, there is a ton of non-revenue generating stuff they can cut to maintain margins. But still, makes me wonder.
amazing how the world changes in 7 years.
sarah palin. osama bin laden. twin towers. wikipedia. barack obama (less than 1K)
haha, wow. good old days
http://gatesand...s.blogspot.com/
I <3 crap comments with irrelevant links!
so who now owns the TechCrunch trademark? or TECHCrunch different from TechCrunch?
No firefox or ubuntu for another few years…
…and ‘paris hilton’ returns the Hilton Hotel in Paris. Those were really the days…
Love it… and love searching my website on the Internet Archive… exactly the same time wasting / goof off thing as searching my own name on the internet (which I’m compelled to do twice a month). Also, extremely chuffed to see Indonesia Export generates more pages of results than Tech Crunch.
Seven years is the new definition of history?
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
The difference in how sites were ranked is amazing, lots of nostalgia
was there any google image search back in 2001? that would be fun to see again
Google image search we released in December 2001, this index is from January 2001 unfortunately
search for facebook and the first result is a Harvard page…
not surprising if you know the history of facebook
The better search is for Facebook – http://www.goog...amp;btnG=Search.
Check out the archive version…gives a look at the beginnings. (http://web.arch.../facebook.shtml)
Just missed the facebook post by emw, but have a look at myspace.com, http://web.arch...56/myspace.com/.
Whoever used to own it, must be a little upset now
Doing a Google for Google only returned 58 results – now it returns 1,730,000,000
search “MySpace.com”
Myspace. Data storage, collaboration and management
Free file storage,50 Megs FREE, MP3 files, Linux,Mac,Pc and PDA files. Securely
upload, download and store your files.
youtube = 0 results
wikipedia = 18 results (I like the “WikiPedia of Wiki” results)
aol = 4th result is “aolsucks.org”
iphone = 3rd result is “Cisco – iPhone Support” (I bet Cisco is mad they didn’t trademark the name!)
Well, they did.
From wikipedia:
Shortly after Steve Jobs’ January 9, 2007 announcement that Apple would be selling a product called iPhone in June 2007, Cisco issued a statement that it had been negotiating trademark licensing with Apple and expected Apple to agree to the final documents that had been submitted the night before.[96] On January 10, 2007 Cisco announced it had filed a lawsuit against Apple over the infringement of the trademark iPhone, seeking an injunction in federal court to prohibit Apple from using the name.[97] More recently, Cisco claimed that the trademark lawsuit was a “minor skirmish” that was not about money, but about interoperability.[98]
On February 2, 2007, Apple and Cisco announced that they had agreed to temporarily suspend litigation while they hold settlement talks,[99] and subsequently announced on February 20, 2007 that they had reached an agreement. Both companies will be allowed to use the “iPhone” name[100] in exchange for “exploring interoperability” between their security, consumer, and business communications products.[101]
lol man the results suck lolol
Not much of a billionare nor celebrity back then: http://www.goog...G=Google+Search
Funny
my site is missing
hillarious that you compared urself to Google…lol
This is absolutely insane. Monster.com is offering 97 jobs, Career Builder is showing scraped jobs from 73 sites, and Linkedin of course dosn’t yield anything. This is like a nostalgic time warp for an entrepreneur in our space. Just think what we could have done with an internet startup this year.
Jared
CEO
http://www.zumeo.com
The iPhone existed back then !! …kind of…lol
Search “SEO”
2001 Google =148,000 results; top result is: Welcome to the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity Web Site
2008 Google = 239,000,000 results
And no ads…
It’s hilarious to see Planetcrap in the index all the way back then. Crapcode forever!
try searching for “Michael Arrington ” and see results
My first thought was ‘google “Enron”‘. It’s great too see Forbes and Fortune articles about awsome results in Q4 of 2000
I remember back in ‘99 when Hell.com used google as some sort of “new web searching project” — anyone else remember this?
Damn, that’s old school! Google has come a long way in the last 7 years…which is definitely a good thing!
Jake
NoteScribe: Premier Note Software
bush – “George W. Bush is running for President of the United States to keep the country
prosperous.”
Out of every person on both presidential tickets, Sarah Palin does not exsit. A person with such shallow history might be your next president
My site (http://www.bossftp.com) doesn’t appear!
September 11th also does not show up. Those were better days!