In honor of Google 10th birthday, Google’ve brought back their oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001.
Go Google 2001 index
Below an old-school Google logo (in 2001 they were actually already using a newer one) the input box invites you to search through “1,326,920,000 web pages”. A search for Barack Obama returns around 773 results, for instance, with the top link leading to the old address as it was, and a special link pointing to the Wayback Machine’s archived version of it (today, over 60 million results are returned). A search for Gmail returns “gmail.linuxpower.org”, a Linux “email client for the Gnome desktop”. A search for BitTorrent returns 0 results.
The real fun is in searching the old index, though. Google’s blog makes some suggestions: “‘iPod‘ did not refer to a music player, ‘youtube‘ was nonsense, and if you were looking for ‘Michael Phelps,’ chances are you meant the scientist, not the swimmer.”
Now, why isn’t Google showing the index of 1998, considering it’s supposed to celebrate their 10th birthday? “[F]or various technical reasons that are too boring to go into,” Google states in their FAQ, “earlier versions of our index aren’t readily accessible … the January 2001 index is the best we can do.” Google’s FAQ also disclaims that the index shown is not exactly the one as it was in 2001, but that it’s a “pretty good” approximation. The FAQ adds that this special search engine won’t be live forever, but just for one month.
The real fun is in searching the old index, though. Google’s blog makes some suggestions: “‘iPod‘ did not refer to a music player, ‘youtube‘ was nonsense, and if you were looking for ‘Michael Phelps,’ chances are you meant the scientist, not the swimmer.”
Now, why isn’t Google showing the index of 1998, considering it’s supposed to celebrate their 10th birthday? “[F]or various technical reasons that are too boring to go into,” Google states in their FAQ, “earlier versions of our index aren’t readily accessible … the January 2001 index is the best we can do.” Google’s FAQ also disclaims that the index shown is not exactly the one as it was in 2001, but that it’s a “pretty good” approximation. The FAQ adds that this special search engine won’t be live forever, but just for one month.