‘Google in 1998’: zoom back in time with Google’s birthday Easter egg

It may be all grown up now, but once upon a time, Google wasn’t a global tech giant famous for quirky campuses and dessert-flavoured mobile operating systems. It was just a startup, working out of a garage, led by two students who would later become billionaires. But the search engine millions use everyday didn’t always look like the Google you’re probably used to — and the logo once had an exclamation mark reminiscent of another Silicon Valley titan.

On the eve of its 15th birthday, Google decided to offer its users the opportunity to travel back to 1998 and see how far its come. Head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, took to Twitter to point out the new Easter egg yesterday. It’s a simple one: if you type in “Google in 1998”, the search engine will switch to display the results as they appeared to early users more than a decade ago.

To celebrate Google's 15th birthday, an easter egg shows how Google used to look: https://t.co/CvLOJub7zA

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 26, 2013

While the general colours and layout of the search page hasn’t changed substantially since 1998, Google’s flashback shows a version which didn’t have the same level of personalisation, Knowledge Graph panel integration and was all about the links — no image or video previews for you. Oh, and apparently there were just under 235 000 results for the word ‘Google’ — now there are more than 9.2-billion.