Tuesday 7 October 2008

Time travel with Google

Wanna do some time travel? How about going to the year 2001 with Google? As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, Google is inviting users to `Google 2001', the antiquated version of its search engine dating back to 2001.


The website has all the embellishments from the old site, including the logo and a claim of having indexed 1,326,920,000 Web pages.

Wondering, why Google picked 2001 rather than 1998 the year it started? As 2001 was Google's first year with a complete archived index.

A search on Infosys brings largely company sites. Another done on Apple too brings nothing more than company or related sites. Missing are Google News, Images, Orkut and all other such features we are so used to while searching on Google.

Google, however, acknowledges in its FAQ section that this index is not actually a perfect reproduction of the real 2001 index; the company says that it is a pretty good approximation. Some index entries have been removed for various reasons over time.

Google's FAQ also adds that this special search engine won't be live forever, but just for one month.

So, its time to dive into some interesting history.

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