Where in Google are they then?

By MONICA HESSE

The search engine looks back on its anniversary.

It’s a world without “mortgage meltdowns” and “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The most popular “High School Musical” is Linden High’s production of “Damn Yankees” in northern New Jersey. “Zac Efron” is not involved with that project; as far as we know, he and his guyliner do not exist at all.

This is the world of Google circa 2001, a time capsule adventure available until the end of the month at Google.com/search2001.html in celebration of the search engine’s 10th birthday. (Google has released the earliest good version of its index available, which, for technical reasons, is from 2001 rather than 1998.)

Spend a few hours trekking through bygone search results, and marvel at how much has stayed the same, yet how much is missing in this online world that once contained everything you had heard of or could possibly want to know.

Spend a few more hours and marvel at the murky nature of history online — and wonder whether anyone’s doing anything to make sense of it.

In the Googlesphere of 2001:

U“Youtube” does not match any documents.

U“Lolcats” does not match any documents.

U“Sarah Palin” does not match any documents.

U“Joe Biden” does, but the primary concern of his Senate Web site in October 2001 is explaining mail precautions for constituents who want to send him letters. Anthrax.

U“Wikipedia” is there, in zygote form. “Welcome, o ye five members of Wikipedia!” reads one user group. The poster hopes that the new project “will complement Nupedia.” Nupedia ... which was ... what, exactly?

Long ago

How foggy and outdated that world can seem now. How bright the colors were — Yahoo.com, with its pixelated graphics, and Fox.com, with a font that looks like it was generated by a dot-matrix printer.

And Google itself, its logo bulbous and clownish, its results displayed in a juvenile cyan instead of today’s authoritative slate blue. It had an exclamation point back then: Google! Less a search engine and more an infant burping.

Searching through the 2001 archive is sometimes less about remembering what happened in history and more about learning that what we think is important rarely ever stays that way for very long.

“Play ‘Weakest Link’ online now!” offers a vintage ad on an NBC Web page.

“Drew Barrymore and Tom Green to divorce!” says DrudgeReport.com. And also, “Bush has four noncancerous lesions removed from face, head.”

“Maybe iMac’s going flat screen,” writes a tech columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Unreal!!”

But it was real. It happened, we adjusted, and now the headline seems funny.

And then, far more jarring, there are the things that haven’t changed at all:

“Pentagon: ‘Anybody’s Guess on bin Laden Location,’ ” says CNN.com. On the same page, an article discusses a stimulus package meant to aid “workers who have lost jobs because of the recession.”

You double-check to make sure you are looking at the 2001 version and not this morning’s.

The nature of the Web is that it captures everything, throws it up on your screen and says, “Have at it.” Much of its content is unmanned, abandoned when webmasters get bored or news gets old, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a ghost site and a live one.

Online, history has been flattened, appearing not as a linear progression but as a chaotic plane where the past occasionally collides with the present. It’s like splatting paintballs on the canvas of time.

Looking back

Naturally, there are people trying to organize the splats into a meaningful order. Naturally, those people are librarians and archivists. Google was not the first group to think of delving into the ghosts of our Internet past.

At the Internet Archives in San Francisco, researchers have been building a piecemeal history of the Web since 1996 through a search engine called the Wayback Machine. They call it a part of humans’ “right to remember,” and they have accumulated 100 billion Web pages.

To grasp the sheer volume of information, “we tried to work out, if every page was a cocktail napkin, how many visits to the moon that would be,” says Kristine Hanna, the director of Web archiving services. “We gave up.”

Google founders were so hellbent on browsing the future that they neglected to save their own past; the search engine had to turn to the Internet Archive to re-create its 2001 time trip.

To bring us back to an era when the only hit for “Brangelina” was “Hernandez Brangelina,” born 1933.

What’s been hard for the researchers at the Archive is that the Internet has turned out to be way more democratic than experts predicted it would be back in 1996, when Web pages belonged mostly to academics and tech geeks.

With traditional archiving of books or movies, “the philosophy has been to be selective,” says Kris Carpenter, a colleague of Hanna’s at the Archives. “To think about what has value for lasting scholarship. With the Web, it’s been very difficult to make a determination of what should be included or not included.”

As of now, any Web site can apply to be included in the Wayback Machine. Visitors can view everything from PerezHilton.com — sometimes archived five times in a single day — to various versions of AOL.com, spanning more than a decade.

The Archive recently launched a project to learn what kids today would deem our most powerful online cultural signifiers. Students elected to archive SaveDarfur.org, MyLifeIsSoAwkward.com, and SouthPark.com, among other sites. Says Hanna, “One high school decided to archive WerewolfMovies.com.”

Good thing, too. A recent visit to the site showed that the domain name and content had been replaced with the far blander and less evocative Horror.com.

Coming at the archiving issue from a more historical perspective, the Library of Congress has dedicated an entire division to preserving “at-risk Web sites,” those here-today, gone-tomorrow pages that need the tender care of dedicated librarians.

“Like when people run for office,” says Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. After the election, the candidate might sell off the address, or abandon it. “Or some people like to pretend that they never ran for office at all,” says Anderson. Companies change ownership, organizations shut down, and records of what once was disappear completely.

The library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program uses teams of “selection officials” and “crawl engineers” to chase after the disappearing ink of the Web, one page at a time, arranging snapshots into chronological order. In August, they launched a project to archive end-of-term governmental Web sites, capturing Bush-era ephemera before a new administration sweeps in and all the current .gov sites begin to update or go dark.

Future past

Through such projects as the Internet Archives and the library’s digital preservation program, it’s possible to find just about any ancient Web site, as long as you know what you’re looking for.

The problem is that we rarely know what we’re looking for online. One thing leads us to another, and another — online, every connection is like a tenuous spider web.

This is why, in Google 2001, you end up skipping around from “Free Winona” T-shirts to warnings that gas prices may skyrocket at the end of the decade. Smart Google!

Spend enough time looking at any time capsule, and you inevitably begin to view your own era as if you were an archaeologist peering back at it.

What about Google 2008 will seem out of touch in seven years? What will seem shockingly, eerily pertinent? Will searchers of the Internet Archive in 2015 click on today’s CNN.com and cluck thoughtfully? So that’s when it all began.

A pertinent e-mail, from the American Association of Museums: In Paris, software developer Marc-Olivier Barnard is building what he calls the “very first Internet Web site Museum,” Paleoweb.com, which is scheduled to launch this November and showcase the evolution of the Internet for future generations.

Unlike the archives you have to search through, “with museums, the best is displayed right there,” Barnard says.

Already curated, already organized, just waiting for us to come and discover what it was we once searched for.