Celebrating its 15th birthday on Friday, Google snuck an Easter Egg into its search engine. Head over to Google, search for "Google in 1998" and see what happens.
The site will take you back to how it looked a decade and a half ago, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to take a research project they had been working on for their PhDs and turn it into an Internet company that would grow to be worth nearly $300 billion.
The trick is not uncommon for the search engine; just try Googling "do a barrel roll."
This Easter Egg was tweeted out by Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, ahead of the site's self-proclaimed birthday on Friday, Sept. 27. In years past, Google had claimed Sept. 7, the day it said it was incorporated, as its birthday. But as keen Google observer Danny Sullivan has explained, Google in 2005 moved its birthday to coincide with a press announcement trumpeting a web-traffic milestone.
The ultimate bit of nostalgia? Scroll all the way to the bottom, where Google encourages you to "[t]ry your query" on then-competing search engines such as AltaVista, HotBot and Infoseek. Those sites only wish they made it to that 15-year milestone.
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