Google is celebrating its tenth birthday, and as part of the celebrations has put online the oldest version of its index it can find, which as it happens is from 2001.

googleYou can play retro-google and marvel as you search a much smaller and simpler online world. But the bigger jolt comes from realising that if google is 10, that means that only eleven years ago there was no google, and so none of the things which have been enabled by the transformation in findability which it represents. It’s hard now to remember just how frustrating search was back in the dark ages.

I was at a meeting earlier this week where the topic was ways of delivering a policy objective up to 2020.  That’s a world in which today’s six year olds will be adults – and in which we may be marvelling about the change in our experience and expectations from something which hasn’t been invented yet.