Google through the ages-from 1998 to 2007

The Google search engine started sometime in 1998. The page format has not changed much! since that time. Although Google homepage is controversially the worlds costliest piece of real estate, it still remains simple and elegant. In this post i track the changing views of the homepage using the waybackmachine

The first page dates back to November 11th 1998. It has links to Google Search Engine Prototype
and
Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

Google search engine alpha version.
The first ever screen shot of Google would look something like the one below:


I wonder why the "!" is used so frequently. May it is some other character. But the interesting part is that way back then, they had people subscribing to to Google updates. And even custom search engines on Linux and Stanford.The I am feeling lucky button was there alright. A huge link to about Google.

The beta version had more links and looked as below:
Thats colorful. And a lot more links than the previous version.And making Google as your default was much more complicated than just clicking on a link.I will probably track Google further throught the years in my next post.