Ego-surfing, 2001 style!

10 October 2008 · Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

In honor of their 10th anniversary, Google have made available search as it was in 2001 (love the exclamation point on the logo, guys!).

So, I did what probably 90% of people did upon hearing this news: I Googled my name!

On the 2001 web, I came up #2 out of the 22,400 results. That compares to now where I come up #1 out of 1,090,000 results.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t author those additional 1,067,600 pages. Where did they all come from?

About the author

In this photo, Andrew wears a Jeep baseball cap and sunglasses. The sky is bright blue behind him and his long, white beard is backlit by the sun. Andrew Hedges is an educator and technologist based in Portland, Oregon. A professional web developer since 1998, Andrew is the Cofounder of and COO for Assistiv Labs, a web accessibility testing platform. Prior to Assistiv Labs, Andrew provided engineering leadership to Disney, Apple, and Zapier.

During the Summer of 2019, Andrew founded The Collab Lab, a nonprofit that provides remote, collaborative project practice for early career web developers. The program brings code school graduates and self-taught career switchers together with working web developers to work on software projects using agile practices used by professional software teams.

Outside of work, Andrew publishes books with his dad via Road’s End Press and produces The Slant and Go, a podcast about the National Football League.

Prior to his career in web development, Andrew worked in higher education administration, coordinating training programs for university staff. He holds a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1995, Andrew wrote his terminal paper for that degree on the potential effects of computer-mediated communication on college student identity development.