Over the last decade, we have given a lot to Google. Our personal information for targeted advertising, billions of search terms for data-mining, billions of ad revenue, and our overall privacy. S0, to celebrate its 10th birthday, big Google decided to return the favor and offer us with a gift: the chance to travel back to search the web from 2001 (which is good, because what the hell do you get the company that has everything?).
Enter Google Search 2001, which allows you to go through indexed results from yesteryear. Plus, if you click on the cached link, you can often see what pages were like way-back-when.
Here are a few of my favorite searches so far (and note, some of the results are hilarious to see who ranked well for what back then):
- “Social Media” - Google 2001 /Google Now
- “Gadget Blog” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “Ruby on Rails” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “Email” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “iPhone” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “Wii” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “Wikipedia” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “YouTube” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “Facebook” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- “MySpace” - Google 2001 / Google Now
- And finally my favorite: “Google” - Google 2001 - Google Now
Obviously, some things that are hugely important now didn’t exist back then, but it’s funny to see zero results for them. Plus, it’s amazing to see what has evolved, what hasn’t, and also, how unlucky some companies must have been (like “MySpace Data Storage”… you don’t hear much from them anymore).
Also, for a little fun: a small collection of “That’s that the web looked like!?”
- Amazon (surprisingly similar)
- Yahoo! (can definitely see the evolution)
- CNet (same design?)
- Microsoft (almost unchanged)
What did you use the web for in 2001? And what other hilarities have you found?
Happy birthday Google. You’ve grown up so fast!
