Original Google

[Mirage]

Does anybody remember what Google first looked like?

Here's a memory jogger: http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/



Pretty interesting. Here's another page of theirs indexed in the web archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990224043535/www.google.com/stickers.html



That REALLY takes me back to the late 90's...

 

[Albey]

Honestly, Where do you find all this crap at andrew? I mean really, do you sit and think of odd stuff to look up?

 

[Mirage]

Sometimes... Actually I find a good amount in just various site I frequent.

 

[leopard22]

I have to admit that I resisted the move to Google, just because everyone was raving about it in the late 1990s ... instead, I'd go where no one has gone before (apologies to Star Trek), but can't even remember the SE I used to use most. It may have been (OMG, I can't believe it but I think it's true) - MSN :-o

Nice look back, Andrew. I especially like the part on the archived page where they said about their log "If you want to hack on it, here is the XCF file."

 

[Doc]

I used Lycos, then I moved to Ask Jeeves. I was kinda weary about the move to Google, but I use it for everything now.

 

[Julie]

I use DogPile most often. I really like it cuz it has Google, Yahoo, MSN, & Ask all in one. I used to use Google, then somewhere (can't remember where) found a link to DogPile & have been using it ever since. Plus on DogPile when you get your search results, you can single out a specific search engine.

 

[Mirage]

Google actually started out the same as DogPile I think. A search engine that searched all the others. Now obviously they have their own index of pages.

I was also one of those who held out on the switch to Google, but it's been hard to stop now. I use it for almost everything. I also use Yahoo quite a bit now also though.

 

[leopard22]

Yeah, I'm convinced they put something on the Google homepage that instantly drives you to keep coming back for more It seems that once people use Google for just a few days, they don't like other SEs nearly as much.

Plus, since they're still the hottest ticket for search, if you need to keep up on the latest news (which I do for one of my clients), keeping up with Google is necessary. I find the easiest way to do that is to use the darn thing all the time.

BTW, did you like their April Fool's joke - Google Romance? Pretty funny stuff I thought.

 

[Mirage]

Yes I did see that! I had a good feeling it was a joke, but it was funny nonetheless. Actually if you tried joining it and surfing around you would get a message telling you that you just fell for the joke.

 

[leopard22]

Yeah, I like last year's joke better where you could apply to work on Google Moon where they were planning to set up an office. They had actually satellite photos of the moon that you could zoom into (it was just after Google Earth was released), but when you went to maximum zoom, your screen was filled with cheese (not green however).

I sent in an application to work in their new office and they sent what I'm sure was a canned response, but it was better than just being told it was a joke.

With this year's joke, if you looked into it, you could get links to previous year's jokes. When you go back a few years, they were really bad. The humor quotient has definitely improved at Google over the last few years