The Way We Webbed

"Wikipedia" is there, in zygote form. "Welcome, o ye five members of Wikipedia!" reads one user group. The poster hopes that the new project "will complement Nupedia."

Nupedia . . . which was . . . what, exactly?

How foggy and outdated that world can seem now. How bright the colors were -- Yahoo.com, with its pixelated graphics, and Fox.com, with a font that looks like it was generated by a dot-matrix printer.

And Google itself, its logo bulbous and clownish, its results displayed in a juvenile cyan instead of today's authoritative slate blue. It had an exclamation point back then: Google! Less a search engine and more an infant urping.

Google! Less an example of the information dispersal that would revolutionize how we know what we know, and more an example of a really cool time-waster.

Searching through the 2001 archive is sometimes less about remembering what happened in history and more about learning that what we think is important rarely ever stays that way for very long.

"Play 'Weakest Link' online now!" offers a vintage ad on an NBC Web page.

"Drew Barrymore and Tom Green to divorce!" says DrudgeReport.com. And also, "Bush has four noncancerous lesions removed from face, head."

"Maybe iMac's going flat screen," writes a tech columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Unreal!!"

But it was real. It happened, we adjusted, and now the headline seems funny. Ha ha -- silly previous selves!

And then, far more jarring, there are the things that haven't changed at all:

"Pentagon: 'Anybody's Guess on bin Laden Location,' " says CNN.com. On the same page, an article discusses a stimulus package meant to aid "workers who have lost jobs because of the recession."