Google Brings Back Their 2001 Index

As hard as it might be to believe today, the Internet hasn’t been around all that long (~13 years in full force) and Google has been around even less – only since 1998. To help celebrate their tenth anniversary, the company has been offering many cool features on the site to help both bring you back to 1998 and also allow you to view a timeline to bring you back up to the present.

Their latest feature addition is a search engine that utilizes their earliest index snapshot, which they say was captured in January of 2001. Anything you search for here will essentially put you back in that year. If a site didn’t exist, it won’t be found, it’s that simple. It’s a cool way to go back and search for yourself though, to see if you even existed online by your name or online moniker, or your company for that matter. There are many possibilities.

I’m not sure how entirely full this index is, though. I searched for a few sites that were launched long before 2001 (such as Shacknews) and it didn’t give a single result related to the site. Still, if you do happen to get results, you are sure to be captivated. If you see a result that intrigues you, you can click on the Wayback link beside it rather than the link itself to see if there is a copy of the page or website in the web archive.

It’s a very cool tool, and I know I lost about fifteen minutes with it. It’s incredible to see just how much the ‘net has changed in only seven years. Google has gone from spidering 1.3 billion pages at that point in time, to now spidering well over 1 trillion – and they are adding billions more each day. Try to wrap your head around that one!