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.
10 reconstructed results for Facebook in the 2010 exhibit.
Facebook - The social network at 500 million users
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/facebook
In 2010 Facebook was six years old, had just overtaken Google as the most-visited site in the United States on some weekly measures, and passed 500 million users in...
WebsiteVerifiedReconstructed result
VKontakte - Russia's Facebook, with a music library
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/vkontakte
VKontakte (VK) was the dominant social network across Russia and the former Soviet states in 2010. Its interface closely resembled early Facebook, but it let users...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
MySpace - The fading giant with glitter graphics and a Top 8
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/myspace
By 2010 MySpace had lost its crown to Facebook and was shedding users and staff under News Corp, which had bought it in 2005. In October it relaunched as a "social...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Instagram - Square photos, filters, iPhone only
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/instagram
Instagram launched on 6 October 2010 as an iPhone-only app for square photos with retro filters and reached a million users by December. Its filters, such as X-Pro II,...
WebsiteVerifiedReconstructed result
Windows Live Messenger (MSN) - Nudges, winks and display names full of lyrics
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/windows-live-messenger
Still called MSN by almost everyone, Windows Live Messenger was the dominant instant messenger outside the United States in 2010, with hundreds of millions of users. Its...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
The Huffington Post - The blog that became a newspaper
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/huffington-post
The Huffington Post mixed aggregated news, celebrity bloggers and huge headlines into the busiest news blog of 2010, with comment sections in the thousands. Its traffic...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Foursquare - Check in, become the mayor
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/foursquare
Foursquare made 2010 the year of the check-in. Users broadcast their location to friends, collected badges, and fought to become the "mayor" of their coffee shop. The...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Formspring - Ask me anything, anonymously
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/formspring
Formspring launched in late 2009 and spread through high schools in 2010: a page where anyone could ask you questions, often anonymously, and you answered in public. It...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Orkut - Google's social network that Brazil and India loved
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/orkut
Orkut, Google's 2004 social network, was largely ignored in the United States but was the biggest social network in Brazil and hugely popular in India through 2010. Its...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Bebo - The UK and Ireland's teen network, sold for a pittance
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/bebo
Bebo had been the biggest social network among teenagers in the UK and Ireland, and AOL bought it for $850 million in 2008. In June 2010 AOL sold it to Criterion Capital...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed 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.
