Despite a German team winning the UEFA Champions League, 2001 was a pretty good year. Whilst the 4th of September of that year was important for Google, in that they were awarded their patent for the PageRank search algorithm, there’s another reason why this year is currently notable for the search giants.

In celebration of 10 years of Googling, Google have resuscitated their oldest search archives and have set up a celebratory way-back-when search page which takes you back to January 2001. Results are converted into archive.org indexed pages, allowing you not only to see the search results from that time but also see most of the sites behind those results, along with images.

A search for ‘YouTube’ gives no results. Googling ‘iPod’ gives the “Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System” as its #1 result, and while there are many “facebooks”, there is no ‘Facebook’. Halcyon days. Interestingly, a search for ‘top search engine’ gives Lycos as the top result (does anybody still use Lycos?).

As, uh, “search enthusiasts”, this is a pretty interesting little widget from Google, and shows us (if not through the complexity of the algorithm, then by that rather ugly 2001 logo) just how far they’ve come.