Friday Fun: Go Back to Web 1.0 by Googling Google in 1998

Google is full of Easter eggs, from doing a barrel roll to the winky face that allegedly shows up when you open 100+ incognito tabs on the Android version of Chrome. If you have 2 seconds to spare, here’s one more hidden gem from Google:

Do a Google search for “Google in 1998.”

When you get to the search results page, you might notice things look a bit, um, pre-turn of the century.

That’s right, instead of the Google doodle of the day in the top-left, you can see an old school Google! logo. (That’s right, before there was “Jeb!”, Google was rocking the branded exclamation point.)

Oh, and if you’re wondering why your cursor isn’t turning into a little hand when you mouseover links, it’s because cursors didn’t do that back in 1998. Yeah. We’ve come a long way.

The site links below the Google top hit take you to archived pages from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Check out the “Why Use Google?” link for a little FAQ from an era before “Google” was a verb. This page reminds you just how revolutionary Google is, thanks to its introduction of PageRank (or, as Google described it “a complicated mathematical analysis, calculated on more than a billion hyperlinks on the web, to return high-quality search results so you don’t have to sift through junk”) and other search innovations.

How times have changed. What were you up to in 1998, the year Google was launched? Tell me in the comments.