In honor of Google's 10th birthday, Google have given a Google 2001, fully indexed version to play around with. Browsing using Google 2001, is like you are back in 2001. It gives you an insight to how the WWW was like in 2001. One of the first things I searched for was "Usability".
In 2001 the results produced 481,000 for Usability, where as today it produces 26,700,000 for usability.
Its clear that there are references to usability. However, what is striking is that usability was still
important back in 2001. The first thing that comes up is "useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's site (Usable Information Technology)", furthermore UPA is amoung the top 5 hits. I was kind of surprised about this, as in 2001 I was not familiar with usability at all. It only became known to be in 2003
Today, thanks to the emergence of Wikipedia, you have the definition of usability as the first hits. Then comes Jakob Nielsen's site. It no longer states "Usable Information Technology", instead it says: "useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design"
This shows the advancement of usability and how people have come more familiar about it.
A quick look at the first page of Google:
2001: The page does not have many options, like gmail, maps, images etc. However the simplicity
of the design is still visible.
2008: Currently google, consists of a number of options, so you can search for images, maps, news, go into mail and many more. However despite the advance in functionality the simplicity of the page still remains just like 2001. The maintaining of simplicity and its effective search has kept Google on up as the best
Search Engine. I believe it is this approach that will keep it at the top for many years to come.
