What is missing
No images. No panel down the right. No tabs. A serif typeface because nobody had decided yet that search should look like anything in particular, an exclamation mark after the name, and a note that the whole index runs to 25 million pages.
You can type in it. Results come back in the old shape, which is the part that makes the trick worth more than a screenshot.
Kilobytes
Look under each result. There is a file size, in kilobytes, sitting next to a cached link. In 1998 that number told you whether the page was worth waiting for. It is the single most dated thing on the layout and it explains more about the era than the typeface does.
The name before the name
The project was called BackRub, after the way it read backlinks. It became Google in 1997, ran out of a university department, and looked like this a year later.
Old google, google 1998, google in1998, the 1998 google trick, all the same page. The other direction in time is goooooooooogle, which is a piece of 1998 that never left.
What is the modern opposite?
The prompt at google terminal, which throws away even more of the page and still lets you search.
Does it search for real?
The official version did. This one returns a fixed set, because the point is the layout, not the index behind it.
