Over at the Google blog they are reminiscing a little today. Their latest article, Evolving the Google design and experience, talks about how the core Google service, its search engine, has changed since it first went live in 1997. OK, it does not really talk about that. It talks about the changes which it is planning and which are coming soon. But it shows a screenshot of Google from 1997 and I started reminiscing about when I first discovered Google!
I still to this day remember a fateful conversion in my London office (not my London office, but the one owned by the bank that I used to work for) when I was frustrated at not being able to find something (probably using Yahoo! or maybe even Altavista) and a colleague said to me “use Google.com, their results are better and it is fast too”.
I fell in love with Google the moment I first searched for something. It was so clean and so quick. Looking at Google’s article today I wonder how clean it really was, as the 1997 version looked relatively messy really, as you can see below.
Google Homepage in 1997
It is nice to see that the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is still there. I soon realised that all it did was give you the first result, and once I knew that I actually went off the button. Anyway.
One thought – when did Google stop using the exclamation mark? Maybe someone criticised them for looking too much like their arch rival Yahoo! (remember them? what happened to Yahoo!?).
25 million pages were indexed in 1997. I wonder how many are indexed today? Let’s ask Google!
Well, that is a but naff. I just Googled “how many pages are indexed in google?” and the first answer is from a webpage called How Many of Your Pages Indexed at Google? which was written on 17 Dec 2008. Google Fail! OK, I will chose for results from the last week ….. still no answers, just lots of sites with people asking the same question! Oh well.
Anyway, Google is great. Google is still the only clean and fast search engine, and it is getting faster all the time. And they are making it look cleaner too, which seemed impossible. Maybe soon all the Google homepage will have is a box in which to type the search.
Google now indexes way faster than any other search engine (and by any other I mean Bing or Yahoo) thanks to the caffeine injection, and with the new Chrome instant website loading feature here (or coming very soon) pages will load pretty much instantly (I wonder if hitting the “Lucky” button will lead to instant downloads…..
Google Design Updates
The last paragraph is very interesting:
“Starting today and over the course of the next few months, look for a series of design improvements across all our products, including Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail.”
I had notice the black header strip above the search page, and the other day I noticed a really odd black panel to the right of my Chrome search page. There are certainly some things in the pipeline, but what?
Webologist’s Prediction of the Future Google Homepage
Google Homepage in 2015
