Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Googlepedia

Google's doing something pretty cool for its 10th birthday: it's made the index from 2001 available as an alternate search function. Not only does this let you see the big, blocky logo of yesteryear, but your search results will actually display the results you would have gotten in 2001.

In particular, I was very amused when I performed a search for "wikipedia." This is what I got. That's right, 681 results. This was literally back when wikipedia was new. I'm particularly amused by the quote, "Who knows where this will go?" on one of the results.

For comparison, this is what you get if you search for "wikipedia" today. With 284,000,000 results, I think it's safe to say that wikipedia's profile on the internet has raised over the last 7 years.

2001 was a more innocent time. A quick search for "September 11" came up with a mere 8 million results, none of which had to do with terrorism...

What kind of interesting things have you found in Google 2001?

-Silent Ellipsis

*Edit* I hadn't at first noticed that there are links to look at archived versions of webpages! Here is wikipedia's page in 2001.

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