Wow, great article!

Wow, that is a great history, thanks.

I would have never asked for it, but it's still nice to know a little more about Google's homepage. Intriguing...

[Edit: Personman took the time to rework some of the grammar of the post, thanks Personman!]

"You will also often find Google engineers mixing up terminology when they talk about HTML."

Sheesh, who would do something like that? ;) What did they do, confuse an element vs. a tag vs. an attribute?

The finalised Google logo was actually designed by Ruth Kedar...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Kedar

Matt Cutts, Was that the ALT tag fiasco earlier this month?

i love the stories!

Very Good Info. Liked it!!

James : what is the symbol u used to mention the link above in this forum.

This black and white is not a trick! Google is redirected to a page in blogoscoped!

Great timeline/history.

Funny comment Matt (yes, I know the alt/tag/image back-story).

BTW, how much work would it *really* take to make the HomePage of Google W3C compliant?!? ;-)

Gotta be a Googler who could knock that off quickly as part of their "spare-time" project ...or commission Philipp to do it for fame and glory – recall he had a post a long time ago about this.

i thought i know every thing about Google
now i am came to know how foolish i am!!!!!!!
this blogoscoped.com is really good site man
keep going

Great post and some really interesting information! On question, I've always thought http://web.archive.org/web/19971210065417/http://backrub.stanford.edu/ was the first Google home page. Any idea where it actually falls into the timeline?

Good pointer Beussery. Is that the earliest version of Google? Too bad the logo – backrub.stanford.edu/google.gif – isn't available on archive.org.

I've backup'ed that page here now too:
http://blogoscoped.com/files/backrub.txt

The original project page was here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/http://backrub.stanford.edu/backrub.html

I wished the Internet archive cached graphics back in those days.

Colin, I seem to remember seeing that page with this logo:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/logos/backrub.jpg

Here's a cache which looks similar:

http://backrub.c63.be/1997/backrub.htm

Thanks Tony!!

That also has the original Google logo on this page:
http://backrub.c63.be/1997/index.htm

Same one hosted on Google...

http://www.google.com/intl/en/logos/carlpgoogle.gif

yeah, my previous post is the earliest page I know of that says "Google" and not "backrub". So, do you think it is the first?

> The original project page was here:
> web.archive.org/web/1997121006 ...

It's been a while since I saw a comment like this in the HTML source :)

<!-- Changed by: Larry Page, 26-Sep-1997 -->

(Cached: http://blogoscoped.com/files/backrub-project.txt)

http://www.google.com/intl/en/logos/carlpgoogle.gif

So is this one verified by Google as the first? Or did someone drop it into their copy of the early backrub page because they didn't find the real one on Archive.org?

> So is this one verified by Google as the first?

It's listed on this page, in what appears to be descending order:

<< Finally, here are progressively older versions of our logo, dating back to the days before we were Google... >>

http://www.google.com/intl/en/customlogos.html

Maybe an assumption was made. Perhaps someone at Google would know. Drop Larry an email and see if he's got a backup on floppy... ;-)

Yeah, I asked Google press earlier this day. Will see if they reply...

Hehehe... I bet "Larry" is still on honeymoon vacation!

But hey, while you're at see if he'll verify the following URL as the original first draft of that little paper he wrote.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google.html

Sergey's first draft as well the other drafts are posted over on my blog:
http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/pages-larry-sergey-forgot/

I like the google brain :D

Google: <<Unfortunately, we don't have a screenshot of backrub.stanford.edu. The wayback machine link you included, is pretty much your best bet.>>

Well I guess it's verified?

By the way, Philipp if you got a kick out of the comments at the other URL check out the "FAQ" page with Larry's phone number:
http://web.archive.org/web/19971210065437/http://backrub.stanford.edu/FAQ.html

Wow, Great article. It was good to go back and revisit some of the Google history.

- Dwayne Charrington.
[Signature remove. -Philipp]

I feel really proud to be a part of the world , who is using this great search
engine "GOOGLE".