Google's 10th Birthday and a Sarah Palin Search

Google's 10th Birthday search engine throwback to January 2001 was a very novel and creative way to celebrate. It also, strangely enough, says a lot about the pasts of all of the candidates involved in this year's election.

The strangest thing about it to me is that my own name brings up more results that Sarah Palin's (although most are just results from high school athletic events). Still, googling my name in the "ancient" search engine turns up 43 results. Guess how many Sarah Palin's turns up? None.

Back then she was mayor of Wasilla, and apparently not doing anything internet-worthy. Barack Obama has the next-to-least number of search results at 671; Joe Biden has 3,240; and John McCain has 158,000, with his first search result being his "Straight Talk America" page. I did learn something interesting from the old search results that I didn't know: apparently John McCain once sent a birthday greeting to mafia crime boss Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonano. Governor Fife Symington also sent his regards to the crime boss. Fife was later kicked out of office and convicted of 7 felonies related to fraud and extortion. (Fife would also go on to claim that he once saw a UFO). Hmmm. So if you apply guilt by association, not only was McCain involved with the Keating Five economic scandal, he can also be connected to a mafia crime boss murderer and a crooked, kooky governor. (Apparently McCain and Symington were old friends. You can't tell me that there wasn't something fishy going on between these two and Joe Bananas). Ah, McCain, there's so much we don't know about you that we would so love to learn!

Anyway, I would recommend that you look up a few things on this old engine before they do away with it. It's actually pretty fun, and you aren't quite as overwhelmed with search results. It's odd not seeing a wikipedia page as the first search result of everything you google. There are no MySpace or YouTube pages, but there is a crazy picture of a very young Miley Cyrus and her mulleted dad here. And if you're feeling nostalgic for the old Britney Spears, you can view a number of her archived fan pages. It's a very bizarre experience, but it is interesting to take a look back and see how far the web has come.

With all the things to do on the web, it's amazing to me how much time I've wasted on searching through old websites with boring graphics and fonts, no pop up ads, and few videos and blogs, but is interesting to see old front pages for websites I visit quite often such as yahoo and CNN. Basically, it's like jumping into a time machine and going back ten years without leaving your computer (and you don't get a chance to do that every day!)

SOURCES: http://web.archive.org/web/20011029104619/www.realchange.org/mccain.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20010825163412/http://www.poeticpage.net/images/stage4.jpg