Googling the past
Howard Lake | 7 October 2008 | Blogs
Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary by making available its search index from January 2001. You can now see how your organisation’s website ranked over seven years ago, and who your ranking competitors were.
In those days Google claimed to index 1,326,920,000 web pages, perhaps to point to its dominance over rival search engines. Nowadays, with its dominance assured, it doesn’t even bother to announce the current figure on its site.
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Of course I searched on "fundraising" and was reassured to find that UK Fundraising was the top result in those far-off days when there were ‘only’ 1,130,000 results for ‘fundraising’. Now there are 31,600,000 results for the word.
There are some notable absences from the 2001 results – no Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), no Institute of Fundraising (or ICFM as it then was, which created its first website a year earlier in 2000), and no Wikipedia definition of fundraising. No Wikipedia itself, of course.
I was about to say ‘no change’ in the ranking as UK Fundraising is usually ranked top. But, the site has currently slipped to second, so I need to get off my laurel cushion…
For one month only, have fun in the past at
www.google.com/search2001.html
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.