Verified
Ten blue links, and results that appeared as you typed
Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in...
searchgooglegoogle instant
Section 4
2010 Search
Ten blue links, green URLs, and results as you type. Reconstructed from the exhibit's records, never faked from history.
6 reconstructed results for forums in the 2010 exhibit.
Forum culture - vBulletin, phpBB, signatures, post counts and the ban hammer
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/forums-2010
Before Reddit and Discord ate them, forums were where the internet talked in 2010: vBulletin and phpBB boards for every hobby, game and band, with avatars, signature...
CultureEditorialReconstructed result
Demotivational posters - A black border, a photo, a word in serif, and a cruel caption
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/demotivational-posters
Demotivational posters parodied corporate motivational posters: a photo in a black frame, a one-word title and a deflating caption. Despair.com started the joke in 1998,...
CultureSupportedReconstructed result
Deal With It - Sunglasses drop, argument over
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/deal-with-it
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument...
CultureSupportedReconstructed result
Trolling - Do not feed the trolls
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/trolling
Trolling, provoking people online for amusement, was the internet's defining pastime in 2010, from YouTube comment wars to 4chan raids to Trollface. "Don't feed the...
CultureSupportedReconstructed result
The animated GIF returns - Reaction GIFs, GIF sets and Tumblr's looping economy
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/gif-culture
Animated GIFs, a 1990s relic, came roaring back in 2010 thanks to Tumblr's reblog culture: reaction GIFs from TV shows, GIF sets of scenes, and glitter graphics...
CultureEditorialReconstructed result
Let's Play videos - From Something Awful screenshots to YouTube commentary
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/lets-play
Let's Plays, playing a game while narrating it, began as screenshot threads on Something Awful and became a YouTube video genre by 2010, with Minecraft and horror games...
CultureSupportedReconstructed result
The search engines of 2010
Google
- Supported
Ask.com
The former Ask Jeeves gives up on search
Ask.com, once Ask Jeeves with its butler mascot, still had a few percent of US searches in 2010, largely through toolbars bundled with downloads. In...
searchask.comask jeeves
- Supported
Baidu
China's search engine, after Google walked away
Baidu was already the dominant search engine in China when Google stopped censoring google.cn in March 2010 and redirected users to Hong Kong....
searchbaiduchina
- Supported
Bing
Microsoft's one-year-old "decision engine"
Bing had launched in June 2009 with a photographic homepage and a marketing budget that called it a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. In...
searchbingmicrosoft
- Supported
Wolfram|Alpha
A computational knowledge engine
Launched in May 2009, Wolfram|Alpha answered questions by computing rather than searching: type a maths problem, a date, or two cities and it...
searchwolfram alphamaths
- Supported
Yahoo!
The portal: mail, news, Answers and Flickr
Yahoo! was still one of the most-visited sites on Earth in 2010, thanks to Yahoo Mail, the news-heavy portal homepage, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and...
portalyahooemail
Why these are not real Google results
Historical search result pages cannot be reproduced faithfully: they depended on the day, the location, the logged-in account and an index that no longer exists. Instead of pretending, this page searches the exhibit's own records and presents them in the visual language of a 2010 results page. Each result links to an entry with its sources and confidence label.
