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.
11 reconstructed results for words with friends in the 2010 exhibit.
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
Friendster - The original social network, thriving in Southeast Asia
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/friendster
Friendster predated MySpace and Facebook, and although it had faded in the West by 2010, it was still one of the most popular sites in the Philippines, Malaysia and...
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
LiveJournal - Communities, moods and friends-only posts
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/livejournal
LiveJournal was the blogging community that fandoms, writers and teenagers had used since 1999. Owned by Russian company SUP since 2007, it was in slow decline in the...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Rdio - Skype's founders try music streaming in America
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/rdio
Rdio, from Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, launched in the US and Canada in August 2010 as a subscription streaming service with a social feed of what...
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
Amazon - Books, Kindle, and a store that sold everything
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/amazon
Amazon in 2010 was the everything store with a cluttered tan-and-orange homepage, two-day shipping for $79-a-year Prime members, and a Kindle business so successful that...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Google Talk and Gmail Chat - Chat inside your inbox
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/google-talk
Google Talk, and the Gmail Chat box built into the Gmail sidebar, let people message and video chat without installing anything. In 2010 it was quietly replacing AIM for...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
Blogger - Blogspot blogs with orange Bs
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/blogger
Blogger, Google-owned since 2003, hosted millions of free blogspot.com blogs in 2010, from personal diaries to recipe blogs to the MP3 blogs of the music-download era. A...
WebsiteSupportedReconstructed result
eBaum's World - Flash videos, viral clips and content wars
theinternetfrom2010.com/2010/entry/ebaums-world
eBaum's World was a 2000s viral-media site that collected funny videos, Flash animations and images, often without credit, which made it notorious among creators. By...
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
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.
