Time Travel: Google Shows You the Web in 2001

Site boasted of indexing 1.3B pages (it's 8B now) ... and YouTube wasn't yet one
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 1, 2008 2:52 PM CDT
Time Travel: Google Shows You the Web in 2001
Google's old logo.   (Google)

To honor its 10th birthday, Google put up a search engine that reflects the web in 2001, TechCrunch reports. Other than the Yahoo-esque exclamation point in Google’s logo, the search engine has not changed that much since—but searches show the web, and the world, have:

  • "iPod" brings up a defunct document-processing system, while "YouTube" yields zero links.

  • “Barack Obama” brings up a baby-faced version of the Illinois state senator, while "John McCain" brings up his now-retired "StraightTalkExpress.com" in which he rails against congressmen opposed to McCain-Feingold.
  • Twitter was for the birds in 2001, generating 16,200 mentions; now, 92.9 million. Fellow Web 2.0 power Facebook? 1,180 then, 638 million now.
  • Though basketball phenom LeBron James gets 3,510 hits in the '01 search, that pales in comparison to the 6.3 million for him now.
(More Google stories.)

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