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RANDI LYNN BEACH / AP Images
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. Both in their early 20s, they began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
2014-08-20
By September 1997, they registered the domain name Google.com, with the mission of organizing the world's information.
Thanks to The Internet Archive, we can revisit those early days and see exactly what Google used to look like.
If you went to Google.com in 1997, here's what you'd see:
The Way Back Machine / Google
The first of the two links would take you here:
The Way Back Machine / Google
The link called "might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date" would take you to this page:
The Way Back Machine / Google
By December, that was the official homepage, and if you navigated your way to "Help!" you'd get this explanation:
The Way Back Machine / Google
That early site also had some fun, user-submitted logos, too:
The Way Back Machine / Google
And pics of what were, apparently, old logos that the company used:
The Way Back Machine / Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin made the first Google Doodle in August 1998. They were heading to Burning Man in the Nevada desert and wanted people to know where the Google crew would be for a few days, so they added the festival's logo.
Google
By mid-1999, Google had simplified its homepage:
The Way Back Machine / Google
We get our first look at non-beta Google in October 1999:
The Way Back Machine
Only minor updates in mid-2000, as Google adds a few links:
The Way Back Machine / Google
By the end of the year though, Google finally centered its logo and started promoting its ad program:
The Way Back Machine / Google
By the end of the year, Google already offered 25 different language options (it now offers 80):
The Way Back Machine / Google
In 2001, the homepage looks largely the same, but other parts of the site are more fleshed out. Here's the culture page:
The Way Back Machine / Google
It added different tabs in 2001:
The Way Back Machine / Google
Google ditched the blue boxes in 2004:
The Way Back Machine / Google
Everything stayed pretty much the same, until Google moved its different search options up top:
The Way Back Machine / Google
Google ditched the ugly shadowing on its font in 2010:
The Way Back Machine / Google
In 2011, it added a black box around its top toolbar:
The Way Back Machine / Google
Google updated a more simple, elegant logo in 2013:
Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco. She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021. Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.
