This is a screenshot from the first ‘known’ live version of Google available:
As you can see there is a lot of similarity between the original interface and the new one. The primary colors we’re concepted by then, as well as the “submit” box for a particular site, and the “web” at large. Most interesting is the data they made available in the early versions, which unfortunately doesn’t hold true in todays iteration.
As some of you know, Google has removed the total number of pages indexed and a lot of other useful tips for us marketers. Why?
For instance here is a snippit of the original indexes content from December 1997:
Number of Web Pages Fetched 24 million
Number of Urls Seen 76.5 million
Number of Email Addresses 1.7 million
Number of 404’s 1.6 million
Storage Statistics
Total Size of Fetched Pages 147.8 GB
Compressed Repository 53.5 GB
Short Inverted Index 4.1 GB
Full Inverted Index 37.2 GB
Lexicon 293 MB
Temporary Anchor Data
(not in total) 6.6 GB
Document Index Incl.
Variable Width Data 9.7 GB
Links Database 3.9 GB
Total Without Repository 55.2 GB
Total With Repository 108.7 GB
A laughable quote pertains to “performance issues” that we found amusing:
The performance is somewhat poor right now. This is partly due to data going over NFS and antiquated hardware. However, we are anticipating equipment donations from IBM and Intel to help with performance and increase our disk capacity so we can scale to 100 million pages.
The other funny thing to point out, and will be familiar with readers of John Battelles “The Search”, the original concept/index was called “Backrub a ‘web crawler’ which is designed to traverse the web.” Do you think Sergery and Larry have had their backs ‘monetarily rubbed’ now? both are worth over $12 Billion USD. 
3 Responses to “First Version of Google (circa 1997)”
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April 27th, 2006 at 11:35 am
They should bring that logo back on their next anniversary.
It’s sort of like watching old Simpsons’ shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Some things never change…. well at least not too much. It’s good to know that they have kept it simple after all this time.
April 28th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Testing Copying 2…
Now that we have more people than our immediate family using Ether, Sean did a quick look at our weblogs……