Welcome To Bizarro World – Google Takes A Leap Back To 2001

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.