I have a love-hate relationship with Google. I love its search engine, applications, and compatibility with seemingly everything, but I abhor its yuppie pretentiousness, new tendancy to stick its nose where it doesn't belong, and the direction it might be going (ha!).
But today I discovered this little gem: Google's oldest existing search index (from January, 2001) and have been having a little too much fun searching for people/terms that were not in existence/prominence back when I was a sophomore in high school (!).
Such as:
Horcrux
(no hits. At all. This was inspired by one of Jo's anecdotes in her online diary at jkrowling.com, now archived over at the Lexicon: "SEPTEMBER 29th, 2006
Sitting at my desk trying to invent a word yesterday brought back memories of the last time I did so. I had tried for days and days to hit upon the right name for 'the receptacle in which a Dark wizard has hidden a fragment of his soul for the purposes of attaining immortality.' Finally, after much transposition of syllables, I scribbled 'Horcrux' on a piece of paper and knew it was The One. But what if somebody had already used it? With some trepidation I typed 'Horcrux' into Google and, to my delight, saw what I was looking for: 'Your search - "Horcrux" - did not match any documents.'
So anyway, yesterday I Googled 'Horcrux' again. 401,000 results. As you might imagine, this gave me something of a lift as I went back to scribbling nonsense words on the back of a takeaway menu." )
Barack Obama
(returned less than 800 hits. Think about that. Issues and politics aside, in 2001 he was an Illinois State Senator (and one who was voting to defeat the Born Alive Protection Act, at that).
and that seemed unfair if I didn't include....
John McCain
(who received 226,000 hits, many of them referring to his failed presidential bid a year earlier)
World Trade Center
(whose number one hit was the Towers' official website, http://www.worldtradecenter.org/, which is now an empty domain name for sale from Network Solutions)
High School Musical
(over 800,000 hits, and fewer than 4,000 when the term is in quotes... none of which were about a [then-nonexistent] Disney movie phenomenon. What would Sharpay think?!)
YouTube
(returned zero hits)
Wikipedia
(proudly proclaims that its writers (everyone!) had compiled over 6,000 articles and hoped to one day top 100,000. Web 2.0 was barely getting started. Today Wikipedia has over 2.5 million articles just in English!)
iPod
(the top hit was for Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System, and in the first fifty links listed (of about 1,300) Apple wasn't mentioned once)
Vatican
(the official website's 2001 archive is nearly identical to today's, except that the Pope's name is different. I'm tempted to turn that into a fable about the Church 's steadfastness in an otherwise transitory culture... but maybe their web designers just doesn't like changing the template. Either way, one small batch of consistancy was nice)
I also appreciated that the 2001-verision's homepage was titled "Google!" rather than today's standard "Google."
Maybe they're less excited nowadays?
But today I discovered this little gem: Google's oldest existing search index (from January, 2001) and have been having a little too much fun searching for people/terms that were not in existence/prominence back when I was a sophomore in high school (!).
Such as:
Horcrux
(no hits. At all. This was inspired by one of Jo's anecdotes in her online diary at jkrowling.com, now archived over at the Lexicon: "SEPTEMBER 29th, 2006
Sitting at my desk trying to invent a word yesterday brought back memories of the last time I did so. I had tried for days and days to hit upon the right name for 'the receptacle in which a Dark wizard has hidden a fragment of his soul for the purposes of attaining immortality.' Finally, after much transposition of syllables, I scribbled 'Horcrux' on a piece of paper and knew it was The One. But what if somebody had already used it? With some trepidation I typed 'Horcrux' into Google and, to my delight, saw what I was looking for: 'Your search - "Horcrux" - did not match any documents.'
So anyway, yesterday I Googled 'Horcrux' again. 401,000 results. As you might imagine, this gave me something of a lift as I went back to scribbling nonsense words on the back of a takeaway menu." )
Barack Obama
(returned less than 800 hits. Think about that. Issues and politics aside, in 2001 he was an Illinois State Senator (and one who was voting to defeat the Born Alive Protection Act, at that).
and that seemed unfair if I didn't include....
John McCain
(who received 226,000 hits, many of them referring to his failed presidential bid a year earlier)
World Trade Center
(whose number one hit was the Towers' official website, http://www.worldtradecenter.org/, which is now an empty domain name for sale from Network Solutions)
High School Musical
(over 800,000 hits, and fewer than 4,000 when the term is in quotes... none of which were about a [then-nonexistent] Disney movie phenomenon. What would Sharpay think?!)
YouTube
(returned zero hits)
Wikipedia
(proudly proclaims that its writers (everyone!) had compiled over 6,000 articles and hoped to one day top 100,000. Web 2.0 was barely getting started. Today Wikipedia has over 2.5 million articles just in English!)
iPod
(the top hit was for Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System, and in the first fifty links listed (of about 1,300) Apple wasn't mentioned once)
Vatican
(the official website's 2001 archive is nearly identical to today's, except that the Pope's name is different. I'm tempted to turn that into a fable about the Church 's steadfastness in an otherwise transitory culture... but maybe their web designers just doesn't like changing the template. Either way, one small batch of consistancy was nice)
I also appreciated that the 2001-verision's homepage was titled "Google!" rather than today's standard "Google."
Maybe they're less excited nowadays?
3 comments:
The "where it might be going" part is really funny.
Thanks! I can't take credit though; a friend sent me the link a few months ago and I've been looking for a chance to use it!
Here's a possible way to indirectly strike back against the positions Google is taking.
http://www.prolifeinternet.com/
It has all the same functionality as Google, but they donate all their advertising revenue to pro-life organizations.
It looks like they get about $5700 a year or so, which is not that much when you consider how much money organizations on both sides probably take in, but it's better than nothing and doesn't really require any extra effort.
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