Google 2001 Index Offers Search Insights to the Future

In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, they have brought back their oldest available index. Let’s take a look back at Google in January 2001 on http://www.google.com/search2001.html.

This index offers great insights into the world of search, its growth and possibly a look into the future of search, and your online business.

Here are some interesting personal observations:

Figure 1
Google 2001 index
Keyword - seo expert mumbai



Figure 2
Google 2008 Index
Keyword - seo expert mumbai



1. The number of results

The first thing that came to my immediate notice was the number of results displayed. While searching for seo expert mumbai (which is a regional search) the number of results displayed is a mere 47 results that took 0.10 sec. (See Figure 1)

Now compare that with search results for the same keyword in the Google 2008 index displayed 121000 results that took 0.10 seconds. (See Figure 2).

What this means: There is a vast difference of 120953 results, but the time taken to display the results was still 0.10 seconds. That’s good! Google success philosophy to keep things simple and fast is demonstrated in the example above.

The rise in the number of results is also a positive sign. It means more websites are optimizing their pages with region in mind, and that Google has gotten much better at what they do.

2. Relevancy of Search results

The next thing that’s more significant than the results is the quality of search results.

If you look at the results for the search seo expert mumbai in Google 2001 index, it shows up a guestbook entry in the position #1. I visited the site and there was no mention of seo expert on the page. On opening the source code I found this:

--
TITLE CodeGuru

META Name="description" Content="Codeguru is where developers can come to share ideas, articles, questions, answers, tips, tricks, comments, downloads, and so much more related to programming in areas including C++, Visual C++, C#, Visual Basic, ASP, ASP.NET, Java, and more.

META Name="keywords" Content="Visual C++, MFC, string programming,ATL programming, WTL programming,activeX programming,COM+,shell programming,Listbox,.NET, C#, ASP, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX,VC++, VB.NET, VB, Visual Basic Code, Programming, Developers, Architects, Studio CSharp, Microsoft, Coding, download, downloads, community source code, software development, Windows developers"
--

If you notice, the keyword does not appear in the title, description or the keyword tags that have become so important in the 2008 algorithm. In the remaining search results in the 2001 index shows a job listing which has nothing to do with seo, a table of content and then results that have nothing to do with the keyword seo expert mumbai.

In the 2001 Google results the following points are noted:

1. Lots of irrelevant search results

2. Badly written titles and descriptions

3. No regional search

4. The keyword is not present in page name, title, description meta tags or in the body content

5. Lack of SEO companies in Mumbai

In the 2008 Google results the following points are noted:

1. Prominence is given to local searches (geography has become very important)

2. The titles and descriptions contain the keyword being searched

3. The body content has the keywords

4. Relevant Blogs, Videos, Social Networking and Bookmarking sites are fast gaining top positions

5. The quality of sites listed are much better

6. The search is much tighter and the results lead to sites with relevant content most of the time

7. The number of SEO companies in Mumbai has increased drastically

3. Additional Search Tools

In the 2001 Google index, you can view the older version of the site in the internet archives. The date of the last index was not mentioned so the user did not know when was the last time the site was indexed was.

In the 2008 Google index one can check for cache pages (about 6 days ago) as well as similar pages.

This was just one example I used for my experiment.

You can go ahead and go crazy, try using your keywords in both the 2001 and 2008 indexes and see the differences in the search results and quality of sites that got top listing.

And maybe… just maybe it will show you an insight into the future.

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