What did famous web sites look like their first day online?

We all know how google or ebay pages look like now. Did you ever wonder how did the famous web sites look their first day online? With a little help of archive.org we are able to recreate these magical moments. Images are clickable and will take you to the actual site remembered by archive.org.

Google.com, November 11, 1998

We can see that the logo was pretty much the same, and they had 25 million pages indexed. For that time that was very good.

Ebay.com, December 1, 1998

Here is how Ebay looked like in 1998. Ebay started with a very simple page. Before ebay, they were first called AuctionWeb.

Yahoo.com, October 17, 1997

Yahoo looks very simple in 1997 and was more popular as a directory of web sites, not a search engines. That is because at that time there was no ranking based on relevancy so search was very unreliable. It was not before appearance of google that page rank based search was introduced.

Microsoft.com, October 20, 1996

Microsoft.com was very simple in 1996, but still usable considering most of the people did not have an email address yet at that time.

All of the sites are very different to what they are looking now. A lot can be learned from the way they developed and changed to become most authoritative web sites on the internet today.

Continue reading:

• Improve Search Engine Placement with Tags
• Do it Yourself: Optimize your WordPress Site Titles
• Microsoft vs Google – Bing, LookingGlass, what’s next?