Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Google in 2001


As part of their 10th birthday celebrations, Google have made their old index of search results available so that you can search their database from 2001. (It seems that this is the oldest index still available - nowadays the idea of them wiping the old ones seems a bit like the BBC reusing the video tapes used to record artists like Jimi Hendrix on Top of The Pops in the 1960s)

Anyway... This is not as nerdy as it seems, because as Ferris Bueller pointed out, life moves pretty fast.

You can entertain yourself, but in 2001 the top result for...

...Paris Hilton was a hotel
...iPod was the Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System
...MySpace was a data storage service that had suspended service
...Facebook was an internal database for Harvard
...Twitter was a nature page (link not working)
...Orkut was the blog of someone called Orkut
...Bebo was the home page of a musician called Bebo Norman
...Flickr was a random page on a tech blog
...Live.com was Cleveland.com, a 'what's on' guide for Cleveland
...Firefox was a pretty random homepage
...Wordpress was a literary publishing company
...Piczo was an Epson printer
...& there were no results at all for YouTube!

Thanks to Nick Burcher's blog for the initial inspiration!

Update: Unfortunately the Google 2001 site is no longer live to play with. However the old sites are still live, so you can still see the top results. If you want a screen grab of the 'no results for YouTube' page email me!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In 2001 I didn't exist according to Google and Attentio was misspelling of attention... OK I did just use 2001 Google for ego check :)

Tom Hanks said...

Nice stuff

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