Google brought back oldest available index for their 10th birthday | Hacker News Reader

Google brought back oldest available index for their 10th birthday

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72 pointswave45 comments

When I search for Perl, it seems like nothing has changed. When I click through to Perl.com and look at the archived articles, they look like they all could have been written today.

I'm not sure what this says about anything, but it is interesting.

I'm pretty sure this is meaningless as well, but interesting:

Then

  2,730,000 for asp code
  2,450,000 for java code
  1,730,000 for php code
  1,710,000 for perl code
  276,000 for python code
  224,000 for lisp code
  89,600 for ruby code
  9,580 for erlang code

Now

  64,700,000 for php code
  25,700,000 for asp code
  15,500,000 for java code
  1,540,000 for perl code
  1,390,000 for erlang code
  1,160,000 for python code
  711,000 for ruby code
  484,000 for lisp code

There are actually fewer Perl sites now. That is sad :(

"Your search - youtube - did not match any documents."

What a crazy world we lived in.

Some other fun ones:

Your search - "sarah palin" - did not match any documents. Makes me anxious that she is a vice presidential contender.

Top result for "iraq war" is a historical note on the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Top result for "myspace" is an online storage portal (a whopping free 50MB).

"LCD" refers to a webcomic, not an LCD display.

Top result for "china" is a web page whose title is "New Page 1".

And of course ycombinator is nowhere to be heard of. :)

I thought this one was pretty interesting:

osama bin laden - excerpt from the first hit:

Bin Laden has vowed to wage a jihad or holy war against U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia because of U.S. support for Israel. He broadened his threat to include all Americans, military and civilian, in the Middle East.

and

The terrorist said, "We predict a black day for America."

meanwhile: http://web.archive.org/web/20010415022831/cwn.uchicago.edu/2...

The fifth result when searching for "wikipedia" has the text:

"WikiPedia is a new wiki site I have set up at http://www.wikipedia.com/ . WikiPedia is an offshoot project of NuPedias OpenContent encyclopedia project."

There are only 681 results (3 pages), and all of the Internet Archive links go nowhere.

Some differences in how the Google index and IA crawls handled redirects and canonicalization may make it a little harder to click-through to the archives Wikipedia pages, but they're available. Try:

http://web.archive.org/web/2001/www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?W...

...or...

http://web.archive.org/web/2001*/http:/www.wikipedia.com/wik...

...or to see pages beginning 'J'...

http://web.archive.org/web/2001*/http:/www.wikipedia.com/wik...

[FYI: I work at the Internet Archive.]

The only product in our roundup that is solely vendor-hosted, Viaweb Store 3.0 shines brightly amid the e-commerce crowd. You don't have to install any ...

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=viaweb&hl=en&#...

Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iraq: http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=Weapons+of+Mass+De...

I have to say, for what it's worth, this data looked pretty worrisome...

Want to buy or sell a used copy of On Lisp? http://www.google.com/search2001/search?hl=en&q=%22Paul+...

Hmm. This doesn't work for me. A search for anything takes me to a 404 not found.

That's because of the web's ever-popping foam of bubbles, to quote Ted Nelson. The web's main feature is a lack of permanency, because people either unpublish, have to pay for hosting which becomes economically unviable, or host for 'free' until the free host gets bought out and deleted.

Hang on, same result for me. You mean there's a 404 to the search query, not the resulting link. Odd!

i get the same thing. going to try reseting safari and using it there. maybe something is conflicting??

For those of you who have seen Startup.com:

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=govWorks

also, http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=webvan and http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=kozmo

It's got the website I made in high school, but the Internet Archive only has the text of the main page, no images :(

I wish they had my very first "webpage" from elementary school, which was just one of those AltaVista or GeoCities things where you fill out a form (basically the predecessor of social network "profiles", without the network)

Ha! Joel on Software was at http://joel.editthispage.com/

al qaeda turns up 1,670 results back in 2001, (Today is 20,400,000) and the first hit is for a Frontline episode on "Who is Bin Laden?"

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=al+qaeda&hl=en...

Search for "SEO" brings up this : http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=seo&hl=en&...

First hit : Welcome to the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity Web Site

They practically later defined that market.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010413020517/www4.enron.com/cor...

"From stock options to 3 weeks of vacation--all the benefits that Enron employees enjoy."

1. Searching in 2001 for: altavista google, the 3rd result is: "AltaVista launches Google competitor"

2. Searching in 2008 for: google facebook, the 3rd result is: Google’s Response to Facebook: "Maka-Maka"

If history can teach something, Google's future is doomed. :)

Impressive . . . they decided to forgo search driven ad revenue for the day.

Call it irony, but I think this produces higher quality results than paid results.

Interesting little quirk, search for 'gmail' and look at the results. Nostalgia of proportions only a true geek would appreciate.

haha.

You know, I didn't appreciate the magnitude of what they did until trying out your suggestion. I didn't realize that they'd literally gone back to the old search index . . . I thought it was just a superficial change.

"... I didn't appreciate the magnitude of what they did until trying out your suggestion ..."

Try "Al-Qaeda".

The index is pegged at ~= 9mth prior to 911. I know it's of questionable taste but it's an interesting exercise to see what public information google indexed. Or try http://www.google.com/search2001/search?hl=en&q=pixar+Wa...

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=%22Osama+Bin+Laden...

Totally interesting.

"... Bin+Laden... Totally interesting ..."

Bin Laden is interesting all right. By '99 he was #456 on the FBI's most wanted list ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Ten_Most_Wanted_Fugitives,_... and now on the Tango watchlist ~ http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm

Man 2001, feels so long ago. That was the year I finally got internet at home, and a few months later I built my first website on Geocities. Damn you Google, making us feel nostalgic.

iPhone?

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=iphone&hl=en&#...

4th hit "Cisco - iPhone Support"

Explains the settlment: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/22/business/cisco.php

10th hit:

> iPhone

> The revolutionary iPhone is a fully integrated telephone and Internet device with a built-in touch screen to bring the world of the Internet into your home ...

> http://www.uioa.com/productcatalog/ - View old version on the Internet Archive

Wait, what??

Searching for "financial bailout" brings up links on the Russian bailout question years ago. Everything old is new again!

Search for "Bush":

"George W. Bush is running for President of the United States to keep the country prosperous."

"George W Bush -- not a crackhead!"

I actually got results when searching for myself :-)

What a bunch of crap I wrote back then...

dot.com me:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011107114829/www.efn.org/~david...

Thanks, I feel better now

:-)

There is an older index. Why does no one use The Way Back Machine?

http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/google.stanford.ed...

Perhaps this is when Google became google.com?

Google's index is the crawling information they gathered. You can actually do searches and get results as they would have been 7 years ago. The WayBack Machine just caches the HTML pages and would not provide this functionality.

Briefly in 2004, the Wayback Machine provided a search engine for its entire archive, back to about 1997. This is now gone. Probably Amazon didn't like it (Amazon owns Alexa and thus controls the WM caching).

Wow, I was ungoogleable back then.

google! - "yahoo!" wanna-be? :)

Search for iPod gives this as 1st result: " Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System" http://www.aperta.co.uk/ipod.htm

But the 3rd result is interesting...Page title - 'iPod' !! http://www.vrex.com/apps/html/ipod.html (page cannot be found..anyone knows what is this iPod?)

Bootstrapping it: 3,780,000 versus 2,860,000,000

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