Your favorite search engine (for the time being, if Yahoo has its way) is celebrating its 15th birthday this month. To commemorate the occasion, Google did what Google does best in these situations: create a doodle.
If you head to Google's homepage today, you can play an interactive doodle that lets you smack a piñata around. (Very festive.) But, that's not the only thing they set up. Google busted out their other go-to celebration feature: the Easter egg—and those kids who grew up in the 90s are probably going to appreciate this one the most. If you head to the company's homepage and type in "Google in 1998," you'll be taken to a Google search page that's right out of 1998. The logo, the absence of photos, the big text, it all feels the same, but looks radically different than today. Unfortunately, you can't search for anything else in 1998 mode, the only word that is searchable, by default, is "google." The homepage says that it found 234,000 results for "google," but if you search the word today, you'll get 9,450,000,000 results. Times have changed.
Outside of things you can see, Google gave itself a present in the form of a new algorithm called "Hummingbird." This new algorithm is meant to help make more relevant results come up when you type in longer, more advanced searches. The company says this affects 90-percent of users.
Here's a video of Google in 1998 using the Wayback Machine.
[via USA Today]
