A Blast From The Past

For Google's tenth birthday they've put up a search of their old index from 2001 (it's not ten years ago, but it's the oldest they've got). It's interesting to have a look at how some thins have changed.

One of the big changes is the absence of Wikipedia. Today Wikipedia turns up in nearly every search you make, but was barely heard of back then. The same applies to IMDB.

Kevin Rudd has gone from being number 3 on the first page to being the whole first page. John Howard went from just being number one to being number one to five. Paris Hilton was apparently a hotel in France. An iPod was on of these. The "neil" was not Neil Armstrong but Neil Young¹. Wow had an entirely different meaning. Podcast was a word in czech but not any other languages.

Many terms relating to TV shows have had their results change a lot (Battlestar is a good example).

blog only returned about 76400 results in 2001, but now gives more than 3770000000.

Anyway, have a look and play around with it.

1 To be the "name" is to be the top result in google when you search for just the first name. E.g. Neil Armstrong is the Neil (it used to be Neil Gaiman), Sarah Palin is now the Sarah , and Kevin Rudd is the Kevin.

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