Google Blogoscoped

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Google Newsletter From 1998

[Search the web using Google!]
Google at Stanford back in late 1998.

This Google newsletter called “Google Friends” sent out on July 8, 1998, is interesting for historical reasons:

Subject: New Features
From: Larry Page

First, I’d like to welcome a whole bunch of new subscribers to the Google-Friends list. This list is an announcement list for the Google search engine which is available at http://google.stanford.edu/.

We recently added some new features to Google. The most significant is a summary for each result that highlights where your query matched. This makes for a much more informative summary than most search engines provide. You can actually see where your query matched without having to download each page.

Also, you can fetch contents from our repository by clicking on the “Cached” link near each result. This often is faster than going to the original, but of course can give you outdated information since it is based on our last crawl. This feature can be very useful if the original is not available or the network is down, you will still have access to the page (but not the images).

We also made some enhancements to our search code that produce more matches for many queries, improving performance significantly, we have also done some more tuning of the ranking functions.

After combining our web server and search engine for better performance, we have been experiencing intermittent problems with our system being down for short amounts of time fairly frequently. If you have trouble getting to the system, try back in a minute or two, and it should be back up.

Expect to see a lot of changes in Google in the next few months. We plan to have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages soon. Thanks to all the people who have sent us logos, HTML and suggestions. Keep them coming!

Have fun and keep googling!

-Larry

 


Google’s About page way back.

 
The Google logo colors back then weren’t as clearly defined as they are today, as these images found on Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s old homepages show. Sergey on his homepage (still available today) wrote “Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I’m no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page.”

Also see a visual timeline of the Google homepage.

[Thanks Stefan2904. Via the Wayback Machine.]

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!