Searching back in time 

3 October 2008 tbs.pm/949

It’s Google’s 10th anniversary, and to celebrate they’ve put up the oldest index they can find, from January 2001, with a search page to match: click here for the 2001 search page.

You can search here for anything available then, and in addition to giving you a link to what the page looks like today, you can also use the Internet Archive to see what it looked like way back then – and sites are virtually completely intact bar a few missing images (and dynamic code, for example to show the current date, will work). Try putting in “Transdiffusion” and you can see what the home page looked like for the Christmas 2001 Edition. Neat. Follow the links and look at the way we were in 2001!

In January 2001, Google allowed you to search 1,326,920,000 web pages. Today they don’t even publish the number of pages they search. From the days when metadata tags were followed by machines, a lot of the inclusion today is based on human editorial review. Not only that, the information is vigorously cross-referenced and tied together as one might expect in this Web 2.0 world.