Take A Ride On The Google Search Engine Time Machine

In honour of it’s 10th birthday, Google has released the oldest version of it’s index for us to play with. The index is from 2001 and is the oldest version available.

It gives a fascinating insight into the state of things back then. The home page proudly proclaims “Search 1,326,920,000 web pages”. I never noticed when Google stopped stating the amount of indexed pages it has in it’s database on it’s home page, but I really can’t imagine what the number would be today?

It is also quite interesting to see how the internet has evolved during the past seven years; there are many results from universities and educational resources in the 2001 index that have been eclipsed since then.

I performed a few searches on some stuff I am interested in on Google 2001 and the present day Google in order to see how the results compare. I was really just looking at numbers. The first number is from 2001.

Desktop Wallpapers* – 202,000 / 7,210,000
Search Engine Optimisation – 12,300 / 72,300,000
SEO – 148,000 / 256,000,000
Blogging – 8,660 / 127,000,000
Adsense – 357 / 48,700,000
MP3 – 10,300,000 / 1,230,000,000
Google – 3,780,000 / 2,820,000,000
Firefox – 17,500 / 366,000,000

Within the results, Google has included a link to the archived version of the indexed page enabling us to also see what the actual page looked like back then. Clicking the link here will take you to the archived page for the site that was number one for the word/phrase at the time.

If you would like to see which where the most searched for phrases in 2001, you can check out Google Zeitgeist.

*Archive did not have the number one result in it’s database, so we opted for number two instead.

Official Google Blog: 2001: A search odyssey