Time Travel Without Leaving Your Desk

Wednesday 1 October, 2008 11:52 am | Search Engines, Website Design | Ingrid

Bill Cammack, new media consultant and freelance video editor, posted the following on Twitter this morning:

Go Google yourself from 2001! :D => http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Who can resist a line like that?  I followed the link – of course – and Google myself, expecting a number of dead links to come up that alluded to my beginnings in web design.  Thanks to web.archive.org, the links were not dead, and so I was able to get a glimpse of my past.

I wrote a post back in March entitled Forays into Web Design, which described some of the early projects in which I immersed myself while still in high school.  One of the sites mentioned was HoMM3 Unleashed, a 100+ page monster that covered everything one would ever want to know about 3DO’s new (at the time) entry into the Heroes of Might and Magic PC game series.  The image above was captured from the Google 2001 search that Bill referred to, and it was the first time I’d seen that site in its original state since I closed it down and passed it to a colleague at the end of my high school career, and I think it’s great to get a glimpse at my roots in the web world.  This is especially amusing for me because everything I used to build the site was basic, basic, basic: a shareware version of Paint Shop Pro for the graphics, Notepad for writing the HTML, no CSS, etc.

I think this is a prime example of how the Internet never forgets.

  • Hi Bill,

    I totally agree with you - odd, good, and bad at the same time. My presence on the web, as well, has come leaps and bounds from where it was. That 2001 Google search returned two results; now, Googling my name covers multiple pages. Crazy, and kind of scary, but all very exciting. :)

    Thanks for the comments!

    Ingrid
  • wow. So cool! :D

    I wasn't thinking about the internet in 2001... Rather, I should say, I wasn't using the internet as a self-branding tool at that point. The only entry I saw on page 1 for my full name that referenced me was this list of freelance NYC video editors that I was a part of. I only started maintaining a heavy, transparent internet presence sometime in late 2006 or early 2007.

    Since then (except for the four days during which my entire site was removed from Google's search results), the only life I know is where a lot of my concepts, thoughts and opinions are openly available on the net to anyone who googles me, or even just "Bill" for that matter. I could almost FEEL the global anonymity when I did that 2001 search. :) I could FEEL how little I used the internet transparently.

    It felt odd, good and bad at the same time! :D
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