Here is a cool Easter egg that lets you see what Google actually looked like way back in the year 1998, which is when the search engine was first created.
How Google Looked in 1998:
It was a big year for technology in 1998. That’s when America Online (AOL) bought Netscape for $4.2 billion. And who can forget the highly anticipated retail release of Windows 98 on June, 25th?
It also happened to bring the founding of the biggest search engine in today’s world: Google. Fun fact: It was originally called BackRub back in 1996.
The Easter Egg
Our internet browsers can’t actually go back in time, however, there’s an awesome Easter egg that lets you do just that with Google’s search engine.
Searching the keywords “Google in 1998” gives you a live retro version of Google, even with the old original logo. Try it yourself:
One big thing, though, you won’t be able to actually do a new search with retro Google.
It just points to a bunch of historic search results for “Google” that link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Also, this Easter egg trick doesn’t seem to work on mobile, so you’ll need to use a desktop browser so see how Google looked in 1998.
Interestingly, back then there were only 234,000 results for the search term. Today, the search pulls about 9,870,000,000 results.
I can’t believe it’s been so long since 1998 already
Wow that’s really cool!
Oh wow that is pretty cool
I LOVE COOL GOOGLE EASTER EGGS!
BEST PARTAY EVA
omg this is so different nowadays in 2022.
I was just a kid in 1998 so this is crazy to see how it looked lol.
LOL this is so cool. I can admit I used Google.com back in the early days of 1998 – 1999.