In celebration of Google’s tenth anniversary (I remember when they launched from Stanford), they’ve launched the awesome Google 2001, an exact view of what their search index looked like in 2001 (not 1998 because 2001 is as far back as they can go). As you can imagine, many of the result links don’t work anymore, but they helpfully provide links to the Internet Archive version of each result.
Back then, there were only about 400 Pings in the Google database (now, well over 3000). Searches for my wife’s married name return zero results, because we weren’t married until later in the year.
What’s really interesting (kind of) is the first result when searching for “osama bin laden”: this page. Maybe President Bush just needed to do a little Googling to prevent this country’s worst tragedy.
Go, have fun. The flashback search is only available for a few more weeks.
Posted in Technology