Slashdot has a thread about a “new” timeline from Google that highlights interesting and historic posts from their 20 year Usenet (aka Google Groups) archive. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a lot of fun. However, as several people including Michael Fagan correctly point out on Searchblog, this timeline has been around for several years.
and speaking of Google’s Usenet Archive…
Web search history types, take note. In 2001 I used the Usenet archive to build this compilation of early search engine annoucements that I posted on my ResourceShelf site.
The compilation includes:
+ Martijn Koster Annouces the Availability of Aliweb (11/30/93)
+ An Early Mention of JumpStation by Jonathon Fletcher (2/27/94)
First Mention of McBryan’s World Wide Web Worm in the Usenet Archive is this Technical Query (3/14/94)
+ Brian Pinkerton Announces the Availability of Webcrawler (6/11/94)
+ Steve Kirsch Announces Free Demos Of the Infoseek Search Engine (7/18/94)
+ Jerry Yang Alerts a Usenet group to the Yahoo Database (9/21/94)
+ Carnegie Mellon University Center for Machine Translation Announces Lycos (8/14/94)
+ UC Berkeley Announces Inktomi (9/26/95)
+ Introduction of Excite (9/27/95)
+ AltaVista Public Beta Press Release (12/15/95)