Jul 26 2012

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook’s First Website

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a great resource for looking at the history of a website. The Wayback Machine crawls the web and keeps a snapshot of a domain or website and it allows you to easily compare different snapshots. Using the Wayback Machine is like looking at the different digital archeological layers of a website’s design.

Using the Wayback Machine, I was able to dig up the original webpage hosted on google.com, yahoo.com, and facebook.com.

First Google Webpage
The first record webpage hosted at google.com is simple page with two links. The first link, Google Search Engine Prototype points to google.stanford.edu. The second link points to another version of the search engine at alpha.google.com.

Google's Website Nov 11, 1998

Google’s Website Nov 11, 1998

The first archive webpage at google.com that resembles a search engine was recorded on December 2, 1998.

Google's Website Dec 11, 1998

Google’s Website Dec 11, 1998

First Yahoo Webpage
The earliest archived webpage from yahoo.com was saved on October 17, 1996.

Yahoo's Website Oct 20, 1996

Yahoo’s Website Oct 20, 1996

First Facebook Webpage
Facebook uses a robots.txt that doesn’t allow the Wayback Machine to crawl the site and as such there are no achieved versions of the site.

Facebook No Robots

Facebook Hates Robots


Dec 29 2010

Random Thoughts December 2010

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas are usually to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to merit their own post.

Which is worse, a developer that will fight you every inch when you ask him to add a feature that upsets the balance of his understanding or the isometry of his code or a developer when asked to add a feature simply does it without question?

It is estimated that up to 90% of Internet traffic is spam. For some product searches up to 80% of Google results are spam because of black hat SEO.

In the span of year a typical teen on Facebook would have written more text than the whole of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and would contain more drama than Shakespeare’s plays combine but it won’t be considered literature.

I travel for business a bit. I usually stay in the same hotel chain, if not the same hotel. I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in. In fact, if I am already in their reward program, and if they already have my credit card, they already know all pertinent information about me, why do I even have to check in or out at the front desk? Here is a million dollar idea, have a way book a hotel from you iPhone, you are immediately given a room number, if available, and your credit card in file or reward card is used to open the hotel room door. There is no need, unless you need more towels, to deal with the front desk.

Saying that listing to rap long enough will make you want to shoot someone is like saying that listening to country long enough will make you make love to your truck.


Aug 19 2009

Technology and Politics

Politicians say the darndest things, especially when it comes to technology. Here are some technology related quotes made famous my our elected officials and civil servants.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
– Al Gore/Vice President of the United States

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got…an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
– Ted Stevens/Alaska Senator

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
– Ted Stevens/Alaska Senator

Internet != Big Truck

Internet != Big Truck

As broadband deployment and more importantly if you look at the megabyte per second how much information can we get though the pipeline is going to be so important as new and new software technologies are introduced what you are going to see is huge change from how applications are architected with skip logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than binary or COBOL ways to interacting with those applications.
– Vivek Kundra/United States Chief Information Officer