like a dream,

the project started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. some snapshots are available here:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html

This is a really cool insight. There are some new things in this I didn't known before this. Good work, I love this kind of thing

did they spam all those emails?

How does this fit into the Google history?

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v15695075yZsmXc5

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2168121

Going back to 1997 – they spider was quite active, competing with the giants of the day like infoseek

I've heard that back in 1996, BackRub used so much bandwidth that wide swathes of Stanford students and staff had trouble accessing the internet. No pain, no gain.

wow :)

Well, there's beginning to everything.

And here's Google in 2000:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/google-in-2000.html

I've remembered that one of Google's April Fool's Day pranks included a SERP and tried to find other old search results pages. I couldn't find something older than 2000, so I continued to dig for more stuff about that year, which seemed to be very important for Google.

Grrrreat post and happy to help! I can't help but think that as time goes by these details will be of more and more interest to folks.

That logo has to be the first!

After further research www-pcd.stanford was migrated to infolab.stanford
(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google.gif) and last modified April 24, 1998.

The logo above is the same as:
http://www.google.com/logos/carlpgoogle.gif
see at:
http://www.google.com/customlogos.html

Before backrub there was 'rankdex'

I thought that was a search engine too but I've never seen it listed:
http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rankdex