Google’s 10th birthday and web search of 2001

As you probably know, Google celebrated its 10th birthday last month and they are celebrating it in a number of ways along with the internet users. On this occasion Google has presented a timeline of their journey of 10 years. This timeline marks all the major landmarks that Google has achieved in last 10 years,some of which are quite interesting.

Project 10 to the 100 is another project that they have launched. Google will accept ideas from users in certain categories. Then 100 ideas will be selected from these and public will vote on these. Finally 5 ideas will be selected and Google is committing $10 million to implement these ideas.

Now the best part which encouraged me to write this post. Yesterday google announced that it has made its oldest index available to users. In exact words  – “In honor of our 10th birthday, we’ve brought back our oldest available index.”. You can find it here. Note that the logo of Google is with exclamation mark. Its also missing the “I am feeling lucky” button. Google will also not be displaying ads in search results for this index

This index is of January 2001 and contains 1,326,920,000 pages. As Google says it is not the exact index of 2001 because they have removed some results from the index. Now an obvious question arises that why they are showing index of 2001 and not of 1998. Google’s answer is that this is the best and readily accessible index they can present.

Searching the web of 2001 gives interesting results. Like this search for AJAX . Search for youtube and you will get 0 results. Searching json gives InterneTV Music Videos-on-demand as first link. Search for php and see the third link. Its Parents Helping Parents, Inc. Home Page. Quite funny, isn’t it? Today if you search for php you will not get anything except php sites for at least 50 pages.  A search for captcha gives 5 irrelevant results. Today it returns 76,600,000 results. This shows how the web has evolved in these 7 years.
The results page is also not much different from what it is today. Clicking a search result will take you to the live version of that page as on today. There is another link with each result titled “View old version on the Internet Archive”. It will take you to the archived version of the page. I searched for google and followed the first link to the archived version of their homepage. It looks like this originally.

This index will not be available online forever. It will be live for a month only. Try searching the web of 2001 till then and do tell if you find any funny or interesting results. Happy searching…

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