Google's 2001 Time Machine; Obama, Who? Palin, Nowhere.
Google's 10th birthday offers a fresh way to explore the historic nature of the 2008 election. As part of the festivities celebrating its first decade of slowly coming to dominate many aspects of users' personal and professional lives, Google has reopened its oldest available search index for use. It's a trip down memory lane for tech geeks; the tool shows Web searches as they would've looked in January 2001.
And back in early 2001, the world was different for the 2008 White House candidates.
Barack Obama was a state legislator who couldn't even get onto the floor at the Democratic convention.
Sarah Palin was a small town politician with big dreams.
Joe Biden and John McCain were veteran Senate leaders, each with a failed bid for his party's presidential nomination under his belt. (OK, so circumstances weren't different for everyone.)
After the jump, the major candidates for the White House as viewed through Google circa 2001. Hint -- Obama only prompted 771 search results. Palin? Zippo.
Back in '01, a web search for 'Barack Obama' prompted 771 search results (by contrast, searching forthe guys behind the song 'I'm Too Sexy' would have drawn 477,000).
Today, 'Barack Obama' has the most search results of any of the '08 candidates with "about 76,000,000 (according to Google page). Plus, this is the site at the top of the list seven years ago, a decidedly humble beginning for the man we've come to know as a political phenom who has run a techonologically innovative campaign.
Obama's rise on Google, however, is nothing compared to Palin's. Search 'Sarah Palin' today and you'll get nearly 23 million results. Search for her in 2001 and you'll find zero. You can find her if you do a little digging, but seven years ago if you didn't know where to find Sarah Palin in Alaska, you didn't know where to find her on Google.
As for the veteran White House candidates, John McCain and Joe Biden, the hefty jumps in Google results for each man over the past seven years showcase how much more influential the Internet is in politics today than it was during the year some of us were eating through the Y2K rations we still had in stockpiled in the basement.
Fresh off his failed first run for the GOP nomination, 'John McCain' had 232,000 Google results in 2001, the most popular was his Straight Talk America page, a vestige of his '00 bid (note the article titled "McCain: Terrorists bypass laws by using gun shows"). Today, a search for 'John McCain' prompts 66,400,000 returns.
'Joe Biden,' a fairly well known senator in '01, had 6,040 results on Google seven years ago, low even for that time (the Senate Judiciary Committee chair at the time, UT's Orrin Hatch (R) had 67,500).
But as the VP nominee for the Democrats, Biden has enjoyed a boost similar to his running mate. A search for 'Joe Biden' on today's Google brings back 23,500,000 results.
There is one change in Google results today that's probably irking the candidates. Search 'YouTube gaffe' today and you get hundreds of stories like this. In 2001, years before Internet video was there to catch every thing any candidate has seemingly ever said or done, all Google had to say was this: "Your search - YouTube gaffe - did not match any documents."
(EVAN McMORRIS-SANTORO)
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