Google in 1998

ByRonny Alexander Hours

Type in the serif box and search. Results come back in the format used when the whole index was 25 million pages, with a file size and a cached link under every listing.

What Is the Google in 1998 Trick?

Searching for google in 1998 rebuilds the homepage as it looked in its first year: white background, a logo with an exclamation mark after it, a beta label, and a couple of links off to the side. It is a working page rather than a picture, so you can search from it and get results in the old layout.

The detail that dates it hardest is the result footer. Every listing showed its page weight in kilobytes, because in 1998 that told you whether the page was worth loading.

How the Old Google Trick Started

It was published for the company’s fifteenth birthday in 2013 and has resurfaced a few times since. The design it copies is the real one, from the period when the project ran out of a university department and the index was a fraction of a percent of its current size.

Old google appeals for the same reason the stretched footer does: it shows how much of today’s interface is a direct descendant of a very plain first draft. The goooooooooogle pagination is one of the pieces that survived unchanged.

How to Use Google in 1998

  • Type a query into the serif field and press the search button.
  • Read the footer under each result: file size first, then the cached copy link.
  • Press I’m feeling lucky to load the name the project used before it was renamed.
  • Use the homepage button to clear the results and see the empty 1998 layout.

FAQs

Why is there an exclamation mark in the logo?

Search engines of the era used them. It was dropped in the 1999 redesign and never came back.

What was the site called before?

BackRub, named after the way it analysed backlinks. The rename happened in 1997.

Does the 1998 trick still run in search?

It comes and goes. Rebuilt versions like this one are the dependable way to see the layout.

What is the modern opposite of this?

The reversed layout in google mirror, which is current but unreadable rather than old but plain. The google terminal strips things back even further.

Ronny Alexander is the founder and lead writer of Co-op Board Games, a site he launched in 2016 to celebrate the fun, challenge, and creativity of cooperative tabletop gaming. A lifelong board gamer, Ronny has spent over 15 years playing co-op games with a core group of friends—along with several other gaming groups—giving him a broad, real-world perspective on what works (and what doesn’t) at the table.