Google, Circa 2001

An anonymous reader writes "If you have 10 minutes to spare, take a look at an archive that Google has posted to mark the company's 10th anniversary. The search engine and its results are based on data from 2001, but it's interesting to see what turns up when popular 2008 terms are entered. For instance, iPod generates a reference to Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System, and the 771 Barack Obama results centered around his duties as an Illinois State Senator."

Comments

Re:This is fucking cool

[The Good Reverend]

This is odd, though:

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=%22Sarah+Palin%22 ("Sarah Palin") returns no results for me, but http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=palin+Wasilla (palin Wasilla) returns quite a few, including many with the term "Sarah Palin" in them.

Any thoughts?

A refreshing search

[MLCT]

This is a useful tool, as well as being a bit of fun.

In addition to all the standard "wii gives no results!" posts, what I noticed, and what was nice to see when searching for a few things, was the absolute lack of blog/link spam everywhere. Searching for a couple of terms that I still search for now yielded 300 odd results - but 300 *relevant result*. Searching for the same thing with the 2008 engine gives me tens of thousands - but 90% of them are just pollution results. The 2001 engine actually kicked up a few "new" results for things that, while still technically available on the 2008 engine, are on page 152 of it - and so hence essentially lost and I have never seen them before.

It links in to what I have argued previously - fork search engines. A bleeding edge "just spidered" version for those who want to chase up-to-the-minute things - and a "stable" time-lag version that would defeat the point of spam (if a blog/link spamming campaign has to wait for a couple of years to get their search results in to the stable engine results then they are less likely to bother).

Re:This is fucking cool

[religious freak]

("Sarah Palin") returns no results for me, but (palin Wasilla) returns quite a few, including many with the term "Sarah Palin" in them. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I know exactly why this would be the case. Their search algorithm sucked back then (relative to now)... despite the fact that it was miles better than anything else.

Remember when using alta vista, webcrawler, etc and EVERYTHING was a Boolean search (usually of way too many 'NOT's.

How we forget so quickly :)