7 ms·
Google in 1998
Google's upcoming birthday easter egg.
- t0 13y agoI wonder if they kept the data so we can search as if it was 1998.
- ivanbrussik 13y agoi would pay to be able to do that for 5 minutes
- LukeWalsh 13y agoAmazing how all of the subtle changes make it look like a kid's toy.
- jrockway 13y agoNot really. The current flat design fad will look tired in a few years too. (I'm going to do a dance in the street when the designers finally get tired of Helvetica Light.) What's really interesting is that the link to Amazon in 1998 looks basically like Amazon today. There's one site that hasn't really changed at all in 15 years; instead of switching fonts around, they built fulfillment warehouses instead. Interesting when you look back into the past.
- LukeWalsh 13y agoI completely agree. I think it's amazing how our perception slowly shifts over time, until things that seemed high tech turn antiquated simply because we were overexposed to a certain font.
- avolcano 13y agoAuthentic markup full of <font> and <b> tags, too!
- mmohsenazimi 13y agoLarry coded that up probably. Don't make him feel bad! ;)
- qwerta 13y agoSo what? CSS was just a joke in 1998
- esrauch 13y agoCurrent search pages still use <b> tags (e.g. when part of the green <cite> portion is bolded)
- ivanbrussik 13y agolooks like google.stanford.edu is still live, but not what it used to be either :/ http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stanford.edu/ http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stan...
- rocky1138 13y agoOh, man, dat java water effect: http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/ http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952/http://www-db.stan...
- Chetane 13y agoIt's an animated gif (http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952im_/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/sergey.gif http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952im_/http://www-db.s...) :P
- jebblue 13y agoJava Applets were light years ahead of anything else including Flash. The single only reason why Java Applets did not become the defacto interactive web client side technology is due to (in my opinion) Microsoft. And as another reader pointed out, it's an animated GIF.
- rocky1138 13y agoFrom my perspective, the reason they didn't catch on was because they took forever to load and most did gimmicky things like the cheezy water effect. If they had used it to make a YouTube-alike back in the day, it might have caught on.
- jebblue 13y agoI see your point but Youtube (good example BTW) wasn't even founded until February 14, 2005, this was long after the Java battles of the late 1990's.
- 13y ago
- dana0550 13y agoThis is an easter egg for their 15th birthday tomorrow.
- Raphael 13y agoTry your query on: AltaVista Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Deja Yahoo! Amazon Open Directory eGroups
- stevetursi 13y agoTrying each of those today (the links on the site go to waybackmachine) - Altavista.com: Redirects to yahoo. Excite: still up HotBot (boy there's one I haven't heard of in years): still up InfoSeek: redirects to go.com, which appears to now host the site of Disney's holding company. Deja.com (which I think I remember): redirects to google groups Yahoo: still up Amazon: still up dmoz.org: still up egroups: redirects to yahoo groups
- randlet 13y ago1998: "Showing results 1-10 of approximately 234,000 for google; Search took 0.06 seconds" 2013: "About 709,000,000 results (0.38 seconds) " My how we've grown!
- benastan 13y ago6 times slower? This is bullshit.
- pestaa 13y agoBut 3000 times more hits, so it's actually 500 times faster. :)
- MarkTanamil 13y agoi lik u
- runn1ng 13y agoDoesn't work on mobile. ....oh.
- benastan 13y agoIt's totally responsive. Good grid system too.
- quink 13y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavista.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavis... is wrong. Try this instead: http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193939/http://www.altavista.digital.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193939/http://www.altavis... GoogleScout wasn't around until 1999: http://googlepress.blogspot.com.au/1999/09/googles-new-googlescout-feature-expands.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com.au/1999/09/googles-new-googl... Also, I think 'Cached' used to be called 'View old version', having done some research.
- tobyjsullivan 13y agoThe altavista.com link is wrong if you are/were trying to get to AltaVista search engine. That said, I'm curious which domain Google actually linked to at the time as the search is still available on that page.
- dm8 13y agoThey were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page
- encoderer 13y agoThat was standard trade craft back then. Everybody did it.
- dm8 13y agoWhy? What was the reasoning?
- adventured 13y agoThree reasons. First, professional courtesy. Search was a very small world in 1998 (that is, in terms of people working in the field). There was an academic quality to the industry, with a lot of freshly minted college kids, teachers and universities involved. Second, a stamp of confidence in their technology. That is: if we're not doing a good enough job, we deserve to lose, and here's our competition. Third, money. Companies often paid to be listed at the bottom of search engines. In 1998 Google was still highly reliant on partners that used their search technology (they were battling eg Inktomi in this respect).
- yid 13y agoAre you by any chance a former Inktomi developer?
- ronilan 13y agoBack then people didn't care their site will leak PR ;)
- andrewaylett 13y agoIt's a bit of a shame that the link to AltaVista doesn't point to the search engine site. I think they did eventually get altavista.com (it redirects to Yahoo now) but the IA link given pre-dates that.
- badclient 13y agoGive me an ajax-less google search over what we have now any day.
- colmvp 13y agoSeeing as how this is HN, I knew someone was going to write this...
- pestaa 13y agoI know this is a sarcastic take on HN's overall conservation, but you must admit Ajax has its place, and it's not necessarily on a search engine result page. Besides, it ruins much of my browser behavior, shortcuts for example don't work at all, such as backspace. A barebones page would have been a better fit in the target environment (the web).
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoGoogle seems to be the biggest culprit in breaking keyboard shortcuts: backspace, keyboards, etc. Surprises me, because surely many of their employees are 'power users' - doesn't it infuriate them, too? I wonder if Chrome has a 'don't hijack keyboard' extension ...
- sxp 13y agohttps://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en
- tokenadult 13y agoFor me, following the link here comes up as my default set-up for iGoogle, the home page skin that Google will deprecate in another month or so. I have used Google since the beginning. I was amused, when I updated my personal website at the beginning of this year, to discover that most of the pages on my site still had a paragraph specifically recommending Google, as if most people had never heard of it. That's how enthusiastic I was about Google when I first discovered it. (I discovered Google when it was still Backrub, but examining which search engine spiders visited my site.)
- mortenlarsen 13y agoTry: https://www.google.com/ncr#q=google+in+1998&safe=off https://www.google.com/ncr#q=google+in+1998&safe=off The ncr part is "no client redirect", this should keep you on google.com instead of redirecting you to a localized version.
- tokenadult 13y agoThanks for that tip. Alas, I still see iGoogle that way. I can try on another browser. Yep, it works in IE on my desktop machine--Chrome must have deep settings that force the customization to iGoogle.
- rhplus 13y agoI assume that the top "Google RN" link refers to "RealNames", which was a cross between AOL keywords and an alternate domain name system. It surprising to see that there, because canonical registries (i.e. Yahoo, RealNames) are kinda the antithesis of what Google was pioneering at the time (i.e. PageRank). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067393/RealNames-To-Close-After-Losing-Microsoft http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067393/RealNames-To-Cl...
- jebblue 13y agoBefore Google I used Dogpile, brother recommended it, before that I had to craft some clever searches in Alta Vista. Google rocks.
- joeblau 13y agoBiggest thing I noticed is that there aren't any ads.
- bastards 13y agoThis was not long after I gave up on webcrawler and altavista. I miss the picture of the spider or web, or whatever. You know, despite it being around almost forever (I think they tried removing it once, right?), I've never really used "I'm feeling lucky". I just never feel that way when I'm using Google, I guess.
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoWhat about Webcrawler and Alta Vista, Lycos and HotBot etc. Did you even use Webcrawler? I'm sure that everyone remembers at least Alta Vista.
- stevelaz 13y agoWebcrawler was my favorite back then.
- Semaphor 13y agoI remember eule.de [1] which was one of the best German search engines back in 1997 :) [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418094812/http://www.eule.de/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970418094812/http://www.eule.de...
- vldx 13y agoI hated that new thing Google and stayed with Alta Vista until the end :)
- josteink 13y agoApart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today. It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much unlike Google.
- bsullivan01 13y agodistracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Depends on the goal. Right now Google wants users to click on ads so if they make everything confusing, ads seems refreshingly simple. Also a link to a non-Google site means less chances on clicking on Google ads so they stuff search with Youtube crap, Local, Images...and they stretch the ads vertically to take virtually all the screen on top resolutions etc. A lot of times Google results for expensive keywords are totally out of whack, but ads are perfect. Google is ripe for disruption and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks. If they lose the Mozilla and iOS traffic it's a nice start. If we had a government, they wouldn't allow Google with all that market share to buy more.
- wjk 13y agoYou cant be serious. I mean, it's nice that duckduckgo tries, but compared to google their "innovation" is basically non-existent. The amount of special cases and functionality google has added to their search engine the past couple years is massive[1]. They have become just fantastic at giving the user what they were searching for right away without even having to click on a link [2]. The use of space by google is so far ahead of DDG it's not even fair. That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too, not to mention all the search related settings you can configure if you have a google account, which also are quite massive. Competition is good, but at this point there is no competition yet. [1] - http://www.google.com/help/features.html http://www.google.com/help/features.html [2] - http://i.imgur.com/rN0Vge0.png http://i.imgur.com/rN0Vge0.png
- laichzeit0 13y agoWhat I miss most is the "cached" link being directly visible. Mostly because 90% of my Internet browsing has to be done this way due to draconian proxy rules at work. Anything forum-like is blocked (yes, even StackOverflow). I cried a bit when they made the cached link a 2 click process.
- stffn 13y agoDo you know about custom styling/scripting? With a littie CSS you can have it visiable by default. Look into Stylish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...
- emmelaich 13y agoInteresting that there's an exclamation mark after Google. Were they copying Yahoo! or was that a thing in 1998?
- wudf 13y agoGoogle would never get away with a logo like this today: http://i.imgur.com/xba1orN.png http://i.imgur.com/xba1orN.png
- kokotko 13y agoMuch better!!
- daddykotex 13y agoThe best part is the : Try your query on : AltaVista, Yahaoo!...