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