That’s pretty funny in itself - using the old index, you get the Yahoo “Humor, Jokes and Fun:Tasteless Humor:Ate My Balls” directory as the first hit; today, you get (what else?) a Wikipedia link, describing “Ate My Balls” as, “…an early example of an Internet meme.”
Christ this is tough. Has the web really grown that much in such a short amount of time? And, dammit, 2001 is starting to feel like a long time ago. It’s a weird feeling since that year was synonymous with “the future” throughout my childhood and adolescence.
I tried “zip drive”, thinking for sure that references to that old technology that never really took off would have gone the way of the dinosaur. There are 10 times as many hits now as there were in 2001!
Yeah, it is. I tried things like “Carrot Top,” “Gallagher,” the names of various characters from Friends and Seinfeld…
I just found one that’s close, though! Remember that old search engine Dogpile? It’s still around, but not doing so well - the name got 465,000 hits in 2001 and gets only 558,000 now. Considering the query [Friends best tv show ever] got 510,000 hits then and gets 27.9 million now, I think that’s pretty good.
“Y2K” – 2,140,000 hits then; 7,680,000 hits today. That’s gotta be below the growth curve.
“Brokeback Mountain” gets 284 hits.
“Christian Bale” – 21,700 then, over 10 million today.
In January 2001 you google Paris Hilton and you get the actual hotel in Paris. It was a simpler time then…
Tom Brady gets: “Tom Brady, quarterback, sophomore eligibility” and that’s the fifth link.
Doing a search for Lindsey Lohan (who was 14 at the time) only gets 281 hits. (Today she gets over 33 million.) The first is her official site, which is pretty simple and amateurish by todays standards. The fourth, though, is an explicit porn story. :eek: