

Google in 1998 - dana0550
https://www.google.com/#q=google+in+1998&safe=off
Google&#x27;s upcoming birthday easter egg.
======
josteink
Apart 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.

~~~
wjk
You 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)

~~~
josteink
_You cant be serious._

Oh but I am. It's nice that you are attempting back your point with concrete
examples, but none of those examples impress me. Those features are
implemented in a way which I dislike.

And that's the thing here: Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as
features I appreciate is concerned. Yes, that is subjective, but so are most
of your points as well.

Personally I much prefer DDG's response[1] to your one search query. I think
the focus-nessed of that response is much more impressive and innovative than
Google's attempt.

Does Google even have a "Official site" feature yet? That's one of the few
things which I use every day with DDG. It's one thing less I have to worry
about when looking for things which are new to me.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/khbMz7p.png](http://i.imgur.com/khbMz7p.png)

~~~
T-hawk
_Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is
concerned._

I agree. But, as always, we're not the customer, we're the product. Google
continues to innovate on _things that make money_. Why would you expect a
profit-seeking company to do otherwise?

------
dm8
They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links
to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page

~~~
encoderer
That was standard trade craft back then. Everybody did it.

~~~
dm8
Why? What was the reasoning?

~~~
adventured
Three 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
Are you by any chance a former Inktomi developer?

------
tokenadult
For 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
Try:

[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
Thanks 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.

------
badclient
Give me an ajax-less google search over what we have now any day.

~~~
sxp
[https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en](https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en)

~~~
badclient
Pretty cool! Now if I can figure out how to default to this...

~~~
ssafejava
[http://www.google.com/preferences](http://www.google.com/preferences), second
box down.

------
jebblue
Before Google I used Dogpile, brother recommended it, before that I had to
craft some clever searches in Alta Vista. Google rocks.

------
avolcano
Authentic markup full of <font> and <b> tags, too!

~~~
mmohsenazimi
Larry coded that up probably. Don't make him feel bad! ;)

------
laichzeit0
What 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
Do 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/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe)

------
Raphael
Try your query on: AltaVista Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Deja Yahoo! Amazon
Open Directory eGroups

~~~
stevetursi
Trying 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
1998: "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
6 times slower? This is bullshit.

~~~
pestaa
But 3000 times more hits, so it's actually 500 times faster. :)

------
rhplus
I 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-
Cl...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067393/RealNames-To-Close-After-
Losing-Microsoft)

------
t0
I wonder if they kept the data so we can search as if it was 1998.

~~~
ivanbrussik
i would pay to be able to do that for 5 minutes

------
dana0550
This is an easter egg for their 15th birthday tomorrow.

------
joeblau
Biggest thing I noticed is that there aren't any ads.

------
quink
[http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavis...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavista.com/)
is wrong.

Try this instead:
[http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193939/http://www.altavis...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193939/http://www.altavista.digital.com/)

GoogleScout wasn't around until 1999:
[http://googlepress.blogspot.com.au/1999/09/googles-new-
googl...](http://googlepress.blogspot.com.au/1999/09/googles-new-googlescout-
feature-expands.html)

Also, I think 'Cached' used to be called 'View old version', having done some
research.

~~~
tobyjsullivan
The 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.

------
ivanbrussik
looks like google.stanford.edu is still live, but not what it used to be
either :/

[http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stan...](http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stanford.edu/)

~~~
rocky1138
Oh, man, dat java water effect:
[http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952/http://www-
db.stan...](http://web.archive.org/web/19991010223952/http://www-
db.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

~~~
jebblue
Java 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
From 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
I 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.

------
wudf
Google would never get away with a logo like this today:
[http://i.imgur.com/xba1orN.png](http://i.imgur.com/xba1orN.png)

------
runn1ng
Doesn't work on mobile.

....oh.

~~~
benastan
It's totally responsive. Good grid system too.

------
emmelaich
Interesting that there's an exclamation mark after Google. Were they copying
Yahoo! or was that a thing in 1998?

------
LukeWalsh
Amazing how all of the subtle changes make it look like a kid's toy.

~~~
jrockway
Not 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
I 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.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
What about Webcrawler and Alta Vista, Lycos and HotBot etc. Did you even use
Webcrawler? I'm sure that everyone remembers at least Alta Vista.

~~~
Semaphor
I 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/)

------
daddykotex
The best part is the : Try your query on : AltaVista, Yahaoo!...

------
kokotko
Much better!!

------
bastards
This 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.

