Google, Circa 2001 355
An anonymous reader writes "If you have 10 minutes to spare, take a look at an archive that Google has posted to mark the company's 10th anniversary. The search engine and its results are based on data from 2001, but it's interesting to see what turns up when popular 2008 terms are entered. For instance, iPod generates a reference to Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System, and the 771 Barack Obama results centered around his duties as an Illinois State Senator."
This is fucking cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Try searching for 'sarah palin' or 'conspiracy theory' for a few minutes of fun
Now you'll see why snapshots are good :)
Nice to see what's missing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Subtle political trolling (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Random searches (Score:4, Insightful)
Napster: (1,130,000) 17.300.000
Millenium: (1,170,000) 23,900,000
Kursk: (98,300) 3,040,000
I guess 3 factors play a role: Google has better spiders, the net is growing and we have more redundancy.
One thing I haven't figured out yet: Have they filtered results which the current version does not display anymore for legal reasons?
Re:Subtle political trolling (Score:1, Insightful)
This how you act everytime you read something about Obama that's not in complete admiration?
This how you react everytime you read a joke?
Re:This is fucking cool (Score:5, Insightful)
This is odd, though:
http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=%22Sarah+Palin%22 [google.com] ("Sarah Palin") returns no results for me, but http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=palin+Wasilla [google.com] (palin Wasilla) returns quite a few, including many with the term "Sarah Palin" in them.
Any thoughts?
A refreshing search (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to all the standard "wii gives no results!" posts, what I noticed, and what was nice to see when searching for a few things, was the absolute lack of blog/link spam everywhere. Searching for a couple of terms that I still search for now yielded 300 odd results - but 300 *relevant result*. Searching for the same thing with the 2008 engine gives me tens of thousands - but 90% of them are just pollution results. The 2001 engine actually kicked up a few "new" results for things that, while still technically available on the 2008 engine, are on page 152 of it - and so hence essentially lost and I have never seen them before.
It links in to what I have argued previously - fork search engines. A bleeding edge "just spidered" version for those who want to chase up-to-the-minute things - and a "stable" time-lag version that would defeat the point of spam (if a blog/link spamming campaign has to wait for a couple of years to get their search results in to the stable engine results then they are less likely to bother).
Re:This is fucking cool (Score:5, Insightful)
("Sarah Palin") returns no results for me, but (palin Wasilla) returns quite a few, including many with the term "Sarah Palin" in them. Any thoughts?
Yeah, I know exactly why this would be the case. Their search algorithm sucked back then (relative to now)... despite the fact that it was miles better than anything else.
:)
Remember when using alta vista, webcrawler, etc and EVERYTHING was a Boolean search (usually of way too many 'NOT's.
How we forget so quickly
Re:This is fucking cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac HOLY CRAP (Score:3, Insightful)
As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
You can also find in books from the 1970's dire predictions that by the year 2000 the world will have been all but destroyed by: running out of oil, running out of food, running out of $SOME_OTHER_RESOURCE, overpopulation, nuclear war, the Rapture, etc.. etc.. All of which are notable of course for not having happened.
Re:Nice to see what's missing (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not evidence, it's an indictment from the US government. It's on the same level as Colin Powell giving his PowerPoint presentation to the UN and holding up a vial of white powder. The evidence they thought they had to support the allegation is not detailed, but presumably it came from Iraqi defectors like most of the pre-war intelligence. We know now that there were significant caveats to that intelligence which were ignored.
Re:Your search - lolcats - did not match any docum (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Your search - lolcats - did not match any docum (Score:3, Insightful)
But there was a lot of the 90's MIDI-playing pages and flashing colors.
You obviously haven't accidentally clicked on a myspace page recently...