Let's take a look at some Web hosting searches back in the day.

As many TopHosts readers already know, the now-famous and venerable search engine, Google, recently celebrated its tenth birthday. In concert with the tenth birthday celebration, the company released a timeline of the past ten years. Among the multitude of various facts and figures available from the company (some are business oriented and some are just plain silly) are these:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s co-founders) first met in the summer of 1995 at Stanford University. Mr. Page was a visiting student considering enrollment and Mr. Brin was a current student assigned to show him around.

Google.com was registered as a domain name on September 15, 1997.

Google files for incorporation in California on September 4, 1998 - hence the recent ten year anniversary.

In February of 1999 the young Google Corporation orders the first snack for the office, other than beverages. It was Swedish Fish.

In December of 1999 the top ten searches for the year at Google were:

1. pokemon
2. apollo
3. slashdot
4. y2k
5. trenchcoat mafia
6. hurricane floyd
7. kosovo
8. DeCSS
9. MIT University
10. star wars

Which brings us up to January 2001. This is the date of the oldest currently existing Google index. The company has made the 2001 index available for the world to reminisce over those simpler times. So let’s take a look at some web hosting-related searches from January 2001 and see who was indexed back then.

web hosting - check out the number four listing. It’s TopHosts.com.

dedicated servers - a bunch of companies that I don’t recognize. Of course there is number 3 - ValueWeb - my old company.

virtual private servers - wow! They did exist back then. Verio and Microsoft are pioneers.

cloud computing - not surprising that nearly every entry is not about cloud computing. However, check out listing number two. It looks like a very forward looking web page on cloud computing. Too bad it goes to a (now) dead link.

who are the top hosts? - once again we see TopHosts.com rise to the number one spot!

And here are a few web hosting company name searches from back in the day. For a look at what these sites looked liked in 2001, click on the ‘View old version on the Internet Archive’ link. I had forgotten how different web hosting pages looked back then.

HostMySite.com - the current leader in vps hosting and dedicated servers looked a bit different back then. An advertiser with TopHosts back in 2001!

GoDaddy.com - yep. They were around then.

Hostway.com - Advertiser at TopHosts back in 2001. Still going strong today.

34sp.com - U.K. web host was selling WAP enabled accounts and FrontPage 2000 extensions back then.

DellHost.com - Remember when Dell decided to sell web hosting? This brand no longer exists.

It’s great to see what we were all doing back in 2001 via Google’s old index. The index is probably a real gem as a time capsule of the ‘State-of-the-Internet’ at that time. If you’re interested in searching around the Google index circa January 2001 you can access the home page here:

http://www.google.com/search2001.html

You can also check out the Google Tenth Anniversary timeline as provided by the company here:

http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday

Congratulations to all those web hosting-related companies that have managed to get indexed into Google as long ago as 2001 and have remained viable up to the present. It will be a blast to look back in another ten years and see how we have all progressed!